I spent some time as a manager and decided I'd never do it again. Many of the places I've worked and observed have directors, principals, architects etc who've never been a manager, and do not include managerial experience as a component of hiring for those roles, so I personally have moved on from thinking it's a required step in the Path to Engineer Leadership. In my experience (a decade, many companies including multiple consultancies) Manager is very directly a "Middle Manager" type position. Meaning, mostly, there is no leadership or autonomy but instead a position derived purely from all the administrative "did you do your job" type checks and balances. "Did you update Jira", "Did you respond to Steve", "Are you stuck?" Everywhere I've worked, the actual "software" or "engineering" components of "Engineering Manager" are handled by someone else.

I am glad I spent the time, though, as I have a much better understanding of workplace politics and interpersonal scheming. Telling someone something specific that is also almost-untrue, just so they get out of your business. Having different narratives for different units of work, depending of who's asking. The ridiculous concept of "dotted line managers". The process was pretty illuminating, both in terms of how unnecessary most workplace hierarchies are and how low the bar can be for individual contributor competency.

After writing all of this, I think it'd be easy to say "Well this person just did a terrible job as a manager", but I received extremely positive reviews from both my reports and my superiors. Once I gave up trying to do a "good" job and just kind of let the ridiculousness flow, everything improved dramatically (on paper; my mental health plummeted).

This has turned into a bit of a rant, and I suppose I apologize in advance for what turned into kind of a scathing venting.