[pfooti]

I was a TL and then a TLM in my org, and am now an EM. I'm actually pretty happy about it, personally. I am organizing an eng summit tomorrow between my team and a sibling team (which is onsite and visiting from elsewhere) in my org, and I noticed that about 18 months ago, I would have been the person to give 4 out of the 5 main talks at the summit (as the expert / TL on that system). Now it's five different eng. This tells me I've been able to nurture / elevate the other engineers on the team, get them all into technical leadership roles, and then have them reach out and be ready to talk about their work to other teams.

Overall: this is a good thing. By taking up less room on the technical side, I've replaced one of me with four strong engineers. Previously, I was split between TL work and EM work and as a result, did a half job of each, leaving too much un-done.

The other thing I'll note is that engineers are basically the only role with this distinction. Product Managers, Program Managers, Sales, Marketing, all those roles seem to combine management with seniority. Only on the engineering side do we have both a TL and Manager hierarchy (while typically the TLs for a team report to the same manager that the line manager for the team does, they exert authority differently). This works out okay on the eng side when there is a strong alliance between the TLs and the EMs, but that doesn't always happen.