Don't become an Engineering Manager - by Anton Zaides

The calculus on becoming an engineering manager has flipped. A friend turned down an EM promotion despite it being standard career advice for years, and the numbers back him up. Staff engineer roles at other startups were paying 20-30% more than the EM promotion he was offered. That's not an anomaly - it's the new normal. The assumption that management pays more only holds within one company, not across the market where Staff engineers are in massive demand.

The structural problems are real. Companies have been flattening for two years. Amazon increased its IC-to-manager ratio by 15%, and the industry followed. That means fewer Director and VP roles to grow into, and you're competing against experienced leaders who got flattened out of those same companies. As an EM, you need to manage more engineers to get promoted, but those opportunities aren't materializing. As an IC, being excellent at building things can carry you much further right now.

Then there's the AI acceleration problem. The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy - from new frameworks to agents to coding tools that ship production code. As a manager of six people, you don't have time to experiment and adapt. You're stuck in meetings and coordination while the technical landscape shifts underneath you. The creator of Claude Code literally asked why Anthropic still needs software engineers. That's not hypothetical future talk - that's today.

The advice isn't absolute. If your gut tells you to do it - not your brain calculating career moves, but actual desire for the work - then go for it. But if you're a senior engineer in 2026 weighing the rational tradeoffs, the IC path looks smarter. Wait a couple years to see how the landscape settles. The management career ladder that made sense for a decade is being rewritten in real time.