Engineering leadership is a pendulum: alternating between hands-on coding and people management builds stronger leaders, and management is a lateral track, not a promotion.
The article argues that the best technical leaders swing like a pendulum between hands-on engineering and people management. Charity rejects the idea of a single career lane and insists that senior engineers should move back and forth, gaining fresh context each time. She describes her own path of building a stack, leading a team, then stepping back into hands-on work, only to repeat the cycle when restlessness sets in.
Management and tech lead roles are presented as mutually exclusive in practice: a manager must give up deep engineering focus to be interruptible, while a tech lead needs the people skills learned in management to get work done. The piece warns that staying too long in one role erodes the other skill set, and that effective leaders must deliberately switch tracks to keep both engineering sharpness and managerial acumen alive.
The core insight is that becoming a manager is not a promotion but a lateral move on a parallel track. This myth drives many engineers into miserable management roles and starves the senior IC pool of mentors. By embracing the pendulum, leaders can avoid burnout, maintain career satisfaction, and build organizations where technical depth and people leadership reinforce each other.
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