You don't want to be a manager.

TL;DR

Engineering management offers less freedom and worse pay than senior IC roles, but the communication skills gained are invaluable for career growth and AI-assisted development.

Key Points

• 1.Managers have far less freedom than ICs, not more. As founder and manager, the host confirms you lose control over approach, tools, and timing — your job becomes enabling your team, not choosing your own path.
• 2.The engineering manager ladder has collapsed. Amazon increased IC-to-manager ratios by 15%, and the number of senior EM roles now equals director roles, making upward mobility nearly impossible internally.
• 3.Staff engineers out-earn engineering managers across the industry. A friend was offered 20–30% more by staying IC and switching companies versus accepting the EM promotion — though the host disputes the sequencing of this advice.
• 4.Never take a counter-offer — it destroys trust permanently. The host says he would blacklist any candidate who accepts a counter-offer after receiving his offer, calling it an unrecoverable breach of professional trust.
• 5.Switching companies beats internal promotion for salary growth. Engineers at the same job for 2+ years are almost certainly underpaid; two job switches in two years can yield three or more effective promotions.
• 6.Management forces communication skills that directly improve AI agent prompting. The host demonstrates this with a Codex experiment where the agent built the wrong chess engine because he specified a task, not a goal — a classic management lesson.
• 7.The goal vs. task distinction is the core management skill most engineers lack. Telling an agent or employee *what to build* instead of *why* causes misalignment; specifying 'don't use Stockfish for your side' fixed what 'beat Stockfish level 17' could not.
• 8.The host's final advice contradicts the article: take the EM role. Communication skills built through management help in life, engineering, and the agentic AI era — and no one knows where code is going, so build durable human skills instead.