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  etothet
  If you are reading this and you are thinking you want to become an engineering manager, I urge you to think long term what you want that to look like. I've seen too often that developers who want to become managers because they think it's the next inventible step aren't prepared for the people management and HR part of that role.And, as you move up to Director and beyond, those higher often have much less to do with actual engineering than tasks that sort of surround the world of engineering - lots of organizing information and attending meetings.I've seen too many developers who though they wanted to manage become victim to the Peter Principle [1].There is nothing wrong with staying a developer, even if you're not "moving up" to some idealized title. If you like the work and you can tolerate the place you work, you're probably ahead of most people in our field.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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  halper
  I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
• chad_strategic
  In all honesty, I don't think I have met one dev that could be a manager.Also from my perspective, the article doesn't make any sense.
• saghm
  > The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy, and it’s not stopping.> But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve.My experience is anecdotal, but this seems to be overblown. I'd say that almost every part of my work looks pretty identical to how it did a few years ago, and that the changes are relatively small in scope so far. Most of the arguments I've heard from those who advocate adopting AI tools are that the rate at which the tools are improving is exponential (or super-exponential, or whatever), which is a prediction about how it will change rather a claim that it has already reached a point that it's necessary. I don't pretend to have any expertise that lets me evaluate those predictions better than anyone else, but unless I happen to be a severe outlier, it seems like gross hyperbole to claim that every part of our work has already changed.
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  ecshafer
  There is a major gap in this analysis by not controlling for industry or companies. Engineering Manager is a very generic title, so this is going to get Start Ups, Big Tech, Little Tech, Enterprise, Contract Shops, etc. Staff Engineer is very uncommon in Enterprise or Contract shops, there you typically see SWE 1/2/3 -> Tech Lead -> Architect. Most Tech companies I think have more of a SWE 1/2/3 -> Staff Engineer -> Principal.The other part is that Engineering Manager is a terminal position, I've known a few people who were manager for 20 years without ever going to Director / Exec whatever, its just a competitive jump and mathematically most will never go up. This is ALSO true for Senior -> Staff and Principle though. But Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get.Finally it is ultimately a career change, and that should be the primary factor to consider.
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  GlibMonkeyDeath
  The arguments:* It's a bad time to move away from techAs a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person" anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities of course. But you are managing people now, and the required skills are different. See below.* The ladder is very competitiveIt's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact opposite - there were far fewer VP-level technical roles than VP people managers.* The pay is lower (for senior managers vs. senior technical track)Again, this is the opposite of my experience (besides at the first-line manager level, where pay was comparable.) Where I worked managers could quickly get paid more with more responsibility. I always thought it was because managing people is actually a lot less fun (at least for me it was.)The biggest reason not to become a manager is because _it is a completely different job_. Although managers need to be technically competent, management skills are much more about people (and politics.) If that isn't your jam, then don't become a manager.
• madrox
  Every job in engineering is changing right now. Managers aren't immune. I've been an EM for almost 20 years in some flavor or another, and I've been thinking a lot about how I want to adapt to this era.This is the first time I've seriously considered swapping out of management. Not for any of the reasons the author says, but because:- I don't feel as confident mentoring others through this period given how much the work is changing- I find myself enjoying the work more- EMs tend to have more difficulty justifying their existence at the best of times let alone a period of change like thisThe AI world will still need EMs. It's just unclear what those EMs will be doing every day and how it will work.
• jedberg
  Not sure I agree (and I made the jump from IC to management).Look at the parallel tracks. A VP is the same level as a distinguished engineer, roughly. To be a VP, you have to be a great manager and got lucky with a few big projects.To be a DE, you basically have to be famous within the industry. And when I look at a large tech company, while there aren't a lot of VPs, usually the number of DEs is countable on one hand (or maybe two).They are very different skill sets. You shouldn't choose your role based on money or career progression, you should choose based on what you love to do, because especially in this world of AI replacing all the "boring" work, the only people who will be left will be the ones passionate about what they are doing.
• siliconc0w
  My experience is that the 'separate but equal' dual engineering track is largely a myth and that if you want advancement, the manager track is a much more viable track. Even with some of the recent flattening, there are still far more higher level roles for management than ICs. They are also given far more visibility and access inside the company which is extremely valuable in a large org. It also seems a good choice if you're not very good - I've seen bad managers hang around far longer than bad engineers.
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  zkmon
  Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle' people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and get into more calls than the others. They not only get more power, but also get more info.
• pflenker
  I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.
• softwaredoug
  Manager or not I think the real risk is overly adapting your skills to one company. Managers becoming experts at one companies politics and cannot instead of general organizational dynamics. The devs who seem to only get by in this one team / codebase, and neglect general skills, looming down on outside info as buzzwords.It seems smart at the time, and makes you more effective in the near term. But it might cause many of your skills to lose portability.
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  UK-Al05
  The document is comparing salaries of staff engineers, and EM's. In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.
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  Esophagus4
  In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean and avoid layers of management which slow down execution.As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading.So if you do go into management, keep in mind you can’t let your engineering skills atrophy… you now have to be good at both. There aren’t many people who can do both well, but companies will expect this moving forward.
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  jimnotgym
  > It’s a bad time to move away from techIt continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory accounts I get referred to the Audit Partner, the most senior manager.The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff.So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech? Isn't this just a sign of disfunction in those organisations rather than anything about the role. Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?And what do these managers even do if they have moved away from tech? Approve holidays and expenses? My personal theory is that in these kind of organisations a manager is the person who is better with PowerPoint than the other people!
• 80sdave
  There is also another aspect of title that needs to be considered. A part of a company I used to work for did work with the banking industry. There is the meme of everyone is a VP at a bank, but for those of us who interacted with customers, we did have VP in our title, which caused internal angst, otherwise at some institutions it was seen as a snub to be dealing with anyone below a VP in title and did actually cause customer relationship problems. So sometimes there are business justification for titles outside of employee relations.
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  jf22
  I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age.EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more friction.You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping 2-3x more code.These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before.The friction is like sandpaper on sandpaper.
• ceramati
  After years of being asked to be a manager I finally said yes and started on Monday this week. This article could've come out a little sooner! j/kWhat tipped it for me is I spend most of my time managing agents now, why not manage some human agents too.
• Eridrus
  One thing I will say is: I wish I had had some EM/hiring experience before starting a startup.My technical skills served me very well in year 1/2, but once we started hiring enough people I could definitely feel my lack of experience.Maybe big tech EM experience wouldn't have helped me a lot, the context is definitely very different, but at least it would have been some sort of baseline to draw from.
• xannabxlle
  If you're reason to not become an engineering manager is because you live so much under a rock you're unaware of a glorified MCP ensemble tool blowing up as number one, then you're not really fit to be an engineering manager in the first place, and obviously not a very enthusiastic engineer at that.
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  ZitchDog
  Saying that becoming an EM is "moving away from tech" is crazy. As an EM you will be steeped in tech, just as you would be as an IC. It just may not be the tech you want to be steeped in. Again, same as an IC. In either case, unless you are working in AI, you will need to "play" with things like OpenClaw in your spare time.The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
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  elzbardico
  I agree with that. The way I see the marketing going forward with AI, you need to be able to have proven outstanding technical skills and deep understanding across several technical domains to be able to add value to the chain. This mean staying in the trenches along with serious self-education schedule. You should be reading books now and doing hard stuff.
• tewr
  There is so much going on in the industry right now that it is not fun to be an EM with rusty tech skills. However, the claim that staff engineers are more in demand is unsubstantiated. Hiring will slow to a crawl as everyone is watching to see where this is going. The EM role is not being replaced as fast by agents as much as the IC role, simply because EMs don't have as much to gain from agents yet.
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  jollyllama
  > My friend was afraid that as a manager, he'd have less time to experiment and adapt. Especailly with a bigger team (he was offered to manage 6), you don’t have much time to play around.You guys get time to play around? As lead/staff?> You can be a great EM for years and find yourself stuck.Better start now then, right?
• Crowberry
  I’m going to be giving off: ”Grandpa screams at clouds”-vibe with this comment. But I’m so sick and tired of ads and popups online.I’ve barely gotten far enough to be drawn in by the article and then I get a giant popup (on mobile) to subscribe to read more posts like this.Put it at the very end and I might. I’ve made it a habit to just exit the article whenever this happens. Nobody respects each other’s time in today’s internet, more intrusiveness = numbers go up.Rant done
• alistairSH
  For my friend specifically, staying on the IC track, becoming a Staff engineer and switching companies would have given him ~20-30% more than the EM promotion he was offered.This is missing something... the friend wouldn't immediately become a staff engineer - that could take just as long, or longer, than a promotion to middle management.At least where I am, the staff engineer equivalent (called Technical Fellow here) is considered Director or VP equivalent. In an engineering org of thousands, we have tens of these positions.Or, if I've misjudged what "staff engineer" means, our next lower position would be principal engineer (typically 1 in 10-15 engineering ICs, roughly). And their salaries are in the ballpark of our engineering managers.Anyway, all this sort of misses the point - it's two completely different jobs. I know plenty of people who don't want to manage people. Or tried and hated it. And plenty of people who are bored with coding and want a chance to put their management skills to work.EDIT - grabbed this from another comment... - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: FellowWe have fewer levels than that... - Engineering Intern - Engineer 1 - Engineer 2 - Senior Engineer - Lead Engineer - Principal - Senior Principal - Tech FellowSo, staff is somewhere close to our Lead or Principal, who earn similar money as line managers. And only Principal+ are on a bonus plan (where all people managers are). For any of the lower ICs, a bonus is a rare thing (where for higher positions and managers, it's part of the comp package).
• padjo
  Some people seem to genuinely enjoy being people managers and excel at it. It's not always obvious in advance who those people are so I'd still recommend people try it out early in their career if they get the opportunity, particularly if their company allows them to back out if it's ultimately not a good fit
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  DJBunnies
  Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.
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  gozzoo
  I don't get this argument: don't do it, you have better otptions, but it is good for me because i enjoy it.
• rixed
  The author forgot one very important reason to go for engineering manager: the hiring process does not include X slow rounds of leet code.
• ark4n
  There will always be a place for EMs and ICs. This goes back generations, there have always been labourers and managers of labourers.Perhaps the balance may tip one way or the others due to AI but something else will come along and tip it back again.Do what you enjoy and are the most effective at.
• arttaboi
  He makes good arguments, but so did all my managers throughout. I think EMs telling ICs to stay in the IC role is an age-old talk. To me, it sounds a bit like “the grass is greener on the other side.”Although, I’m not disregarding his points. I’m just saying that this article feels less about the challenges of becoming an EM and more about the challenges of stepping down from EM to IC.
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  skeeter2020
  This article is not very helpful, just like any sort of absolute yes/no advice. The ad in the middle that looks exactly like the "content" makes it worse.Using OpenClaw as an example of exploding technology and why it's a bad time to move away from this (not sure how EM is a move away?) is ridiculous. And stating the career path is too competitive shows they don't really know what a true technical ladder looks like. Most organizations are going to have about as many staff developers as senior EMs and principal developers as senior directors. If it's stability you're after neither is particularly at risk in my experience, but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
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  notepad0x90
  Unpopular opinion: either you manage people or you manage work/processes, you shouldn't do both. if you're an engineering manager, either you manage your people and let them be engineers, or you don't manage any people and you focus on engineering solutions and managing the solutions themselves.
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  mystraline
  Flagging due to being an advert in disguise.
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  general_reveal
  Might be worth talking about peer respect. Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering? Not really right?Some won’t ever take that position out of sheer self respect.Many EMs are not ready to roll their sleeves up and do the full work, they are only ever riled up enough to roll their sleeves up and begin hiring like a maniac or going batshit crazy with micro management. You see, we all saw you too at work. Just know that. This is the LinkedIn comment you won’t see to your stupid fucking work achievement post - fuck you. Morning rant over.But for my real EMs, much respect :)
• brettgriffin
  It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.
• phendrenad2
  People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion. You might be leaving management in a tough position where they were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down, you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is stuck. So take that damn promotion.
• saltyoldman
  I took an EM role. About a year later they eliminated all EMs in the US and replaced them with people in Poland. So I guess take the EM role if you're in Poland.
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  charles_f
  > he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager roleFunny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my jobEM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.