[noodle]

Fully agreed. IMO its a critical thing to provide engineers an IC career path that enables advancement without requiring moving into a manager type of job. Otherwise, you get people who are shitty managers because they feel they have to do the job to continue to grow, and that turns into a team/org-wide morale issue.

When promoting engineers into management positions, I'll always give them a trial run first in some form to make sure they actually enjoy the job, make sure their new team doesn't see any red flags, and to give them a graceful path to go back to IC without some fanfare company-wide promo announcement locking them into the role socially.