Empirically speaking 90% of the managers out there became so because they were intentional in becoming managers. The reasons are myriad. Most want the power so they can hire or fire. Others with reaching the job safety inherently built into the role.
A lot of IC historically become managers not because they particularly care about doing performance reviews but because they want more influence and to work at a larger scale. This leads to a situation of people managers who care less about managing people than managing delivery and technology strategy. The best of those also have a lot of empathy and inadvertently are good at people management.
Another reason, often related in my experience, is a lot of companies careers plateau for ICs pretty early on. Your comp stops growing beyond COLA, titles exhaust, and despite being young you’re at a terminal career velocity. The only thing way to break up is to become management. This isn’t surprising - who controls promotion and comp other than managers, and why on earth wouldn’t they structure things to reward themselves and people like them? There are many companies that have recognized this and created IC paths parallel to management, at least up to the C level. However the relative difficulty in achieving them is disproportionately weighted against the IC vs manager. At Amazon there’s a crap ton of VP and Director managers. But it’s absurdly hard to get senior principal or distinguished engineer. The rationale is they want to keep the prestige of the level high for IC. But that’s weird - the prestige of the same level in management must therefore be low and why is the bar different for the same level if you’re managing vs building?
I am so tired of the competitiveness in engineering to make the next pay band.
You cant rely on a portion if teammates because they are jockeying for position and in other situations your opinion isnt valued because you are not high enough on the engineering ladder.
This was a disgusting revelation to me once when I heard someone openly say, “I didn’t know he was a Pay Band X! I need to start listening to him.” And then when he was found out to not actually be in that pay band, they reverted back to dismissing his ideas.
