Don't become an Engineering Manager

A friend’s Engineering Manager offer, and his plan to decline it, pushes Zaides to walk back years of telling every engineer that a couple years as an EM teaches skills like hiring, performance management and planning. Amazon raised its IC-to-manager ratio by 15%, and the classic EM → Senior EM → Director → VP ladder has fewer rungs than it used to. Staying IC, becoming a Staff Engineer and switching companies would have paid his friend 20-30% more than the EM promotion on the table.

Zaides stays an EM himself for two reasons. He’s optimistic that experienced, still-hands-on managers keep skills like system design and code review relevant. And he says plainly that he enjoys the job more than he’d enjoy being an IC, even while believing IC is the smarter move in 2026.

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• Companies still need people to run teams, but competition above EM level now includes experienced leaders laid off from flattened orgs.
• Getting promoted as an EM now mostly means managing more people rather than gaining scope in place, and that path may not be open right now.
• Total comp for his friend’s EM offer came in below Senior/Staff Engineer offers at other startups, reversing the old assumption that management pays more.
• The closing advice: if a senior engineer’s gut (not their brain) says take the EM role anyway, that’s reason enough to go for it.