How to fail as a new engineering manager
I realize this isn&#x27;t really the main point of the article, but it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been thinking about a lot recently: Can someone explain to me why I should <i>want</i> to become good at management? I think most people on here (but sadly few company structures) would agree that engineering and engineering management are two nearly orthogonal skillsets, but for some reason we insist on &quot;promoting&quot; people who are good at the former into positions that require the latter.<p>As someone with about five years of experience as a professional software engineer, I&#x27;m really still looking to level up my IC chops, along with a healthy dose of mentorship (mentoring interns or new hires on my team) and what I&#x27;d call &quot;tech leadership&quot; (advising on engineering reviews, making technical decisions about how to best build things). I would basically worry about stunting my development as an engineer if I switched to focusing on management, and I&#x27;m not even convinced my role models for career development are really in primarily &quot;managerial&quot; roles (I&#x27;m thinking of both famously very good backend devs both at my company and at the big SV companies).<p>Separately, I have relatively little interest in being in a role where my output is judged as the output of a team of people who aren&#x27;t me. I get that that&#x27;s the best way to judge managers, and that managers do very valuable intangible things in unblocking their team, but I&#x27;m skeptical that I&#x27;d be able to feel satisfied by this. If anything, it kind of feels random: at an equivalent level of my unblocking the team and being a good manager, if I have an amazing 10x engineer on my team then the output is just going to be higher than if I have an average engineer. So in less clear-cut cases, how can I tell if I just did a good job at unblocking or if my engineers are really good? (This is not to say that I don&#x27;t feel satisfied doing mentorship-style things or architectural advising-style things, but that feels separate to me. I think I prefer empowering other engineers by leveraging knowledge and writing good platforms&#x2F;tools&#x2F;APIs rather than doing the organizational empowering thing).<p>I write all these things, because it really seems like a foregone conclusion of both this article and the industry as a whole that an engineer will eventually become a manager. Is that what I most likely have to look forward to in my career if I wind up working at the well-established&#x2F;mature companies?<p>EDIT: I&#x27;d also just appreciate being told if I&#x27;m thinking about everything entirely wrong or something here.<p>EDIT2: This also isn&#x27;t to knock people who _do_ enjoy doing these things, but it&#x27;s not for me and I imagine it&#x27;s not definitionally for every good engineer.<p>-----<p>Unrelated to the above, point 8 feels a little bit in contradiction to point 1. How does one keep learning their craft without direct experience?