[bsvalley]

Becoming an engineering manager is not an escape from coding. It’s the opposite. To get there you need to be a top performer, which involves being really good at coding and all the other tasks you’d like to move away from. And then, you get promoted and they take it away from you. The best individual contributors become great managers. You should look into project manager roles instead. This will he a better option for you.

[drakonka]

I sort of experienced this. I was getting consistently good feedback as an IC, and my TD and line manager asked me to try out a lead role of a very small team. The idea was that I'd still have time to code as well, but in reality it involved way too much dealing with people and JIRA for my liking. I gave it a shot for 3 months, but really all I wanted to do was focus more on programming and growing as an individual contributor. In a 1-on-1 with my TD where I opted out of the role I told him there was no shortage of people who would love to be in a lead role, so they should just pick someone else. He commented that it's kind of a Catch-22, and that unfortunately most people who want a lead role aren't the same people that would be suitable for that role, and that people who tend to be good at those positions are ICs who naturally may not be that interested in them.

Luckily my company has a TD progression track for the more manager-y types and an SSE track for ICs, so that conversation was a great checkpoint of sorts where it became very clear which track was right for me.