What you give up by moving into engineering management
The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind.<p>You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly, you'll be afraid to disagree.<p>Your only job as a manager is to protect and develop the team under you. You must actually like people and have a fundamentally benevolent worldview. You must be willing to say "I don't know" 10x more than as an IC. You must believe deep down in your core that <i>ordering</i> a human being to do something is a sign you must introspect about your failure as a manager, and commit to fixing the problem.<p>You must be prepared to tell your own manager to go kick rocks. Ambiguous situations are one thing, but you must never, ever knowingly do the the <i>wrong</i> thing. Everyone will know when you do it, and that will be the beginning of the end of your own happiness.<p>All other approaches will lead to you failing to deliver results, failing to retain, and a drag on the org.<p>The error I have seen most engineers-turn-manager make is they had a deep dissatisfaction with other terrible managers, so now its their chance to make the right decisions and do things their way.