reluctantly

I agree with all your points on management roles and had all the same reasons when I left management to go back to being an IC. I'll be interested to know how it works out for you. I'd posted a while back about choosing to go back to IC and getting repeatedly pushed back into management given the experience.

>>If you don’t like that, you can still resist and ask for “Senior” level responsibility but people will slowly lose respect for you as you get older. That’s how humans work: we want the older people to lead us with their experience.

Is that really true? I debated this quite a bit in choosing to go back to being an IC. I get the expectation of mentorship with seniority (and maybe life experience/age) but I don't see how that necessitates being a people manager versus a technical lead to do so. I think that I so often provide that in my IC role is why I'm an attractive candidate to be pushed into management though.

I don't know, but probably not immediately at least given the situation of not having a manager. If I was fully prepared to quit/be fired in response, I wouldn't be asking HN for advice, because quitting is obviously one option to exit the role.

I was kind of amazed when it had happened again, I was less experienced the first time. The second time with new company I was abundantly clear from day 1.

There is a technical track at my company and I'm fairly high on the IC track. I took a fairly good sized pay cut when I stepped back to IC, which I was completely fine with in exchanged for the type of work. The mentoring is one of the few things I like about managing, but there's so much other downside to my quality of life and my technical skills just suffer.