As an Engineering Manager in a Platform team, I manage 10 engineers. I'm hiring more. I run weekly 1:1s, facilitate technical decision meetings, screen candidates, moderate retrospectives, and still need to keep up with the delivery of a platform spanning dozens of AWS accounts.
Besides the lack of time to focus on technical problems, the technical part is not even the real challenge. The less obvious problem becoming an Engineering Manager is: the skills you need as an engineering manager are fundamentally different from those that made you a great engineer, and there's no compiler or unit test to tell you when you're doing them wrong. The feedback loop is absent or very slow (and when you realise that, your team has already gone silent or become dependent on you because you are the main input and the main bottleneck).
Skills That Don't Come From Code
As a senior or staff engineer, you develop communication skills gradually. You present ideas, challenge others respectfully, summarise outcomes, and identify owners. You participate in technical deep dives and put candidates at ease while probing technical depth. These are valuable skills, and a good IC develops them over the years. But unless you start behaving like a brilliant jerk, they're secondary - your technical depth is still what defines you.
