Don't become an engineering manager

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 :)

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.

charles_f

> he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role Funny 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 job EM 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.

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.

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

jimnotgym

> It’s a bad time to move away from tech It 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!

GlibMonkeyDeath

The arguments: * It's a bad time to move away from tech As 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 competitive It'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.

mystraline

Flagging due to being an advert in disguise.

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.

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.

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.

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.