> Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately.

This is me, and I completely agree. I'm on the road back to an IC role. I could continue with being a manager; I'm okay at it, and there's enough room for me to grow into the role. I've been given clarity on a career path and confidence that I can take that path.

But I'm not _good_ at it, not really, and a lot of that badness is in the disjoint of skills that I didnt bring over from technical leadership. Those skills I'm actually quite poor at and, while I can continue to improve, I don't want to because I don't enjoy exercising them.

One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique.

I'm a fairweather manager and as a result I don't think I can be a good manager without living with a lot of discomfort and accepting a lot of deficit in my skills that will be more difficult to overcome given this discomfort.