Don't become an engineering manager

Was it the devs fault for shipping code with a disastrous edge case, or the EMs fault for over- allocating work, resulting in less-refined code and a minimal review process that let the defect slip into production? Just as an example.

I remember that 10 years or so ago, an E5 in Google is considered a pretty prestigious position. In Amazon, L6 is such a high achievement that the entire India site had one L6 for more than 300 engineers. But somehow things started to change. Everyone expected herself to get promoted every couple of years. There was a joke in Amazon along the line of L8 is the new L7.

My guess is that two factors came to play. One is that Meta (and then the Facebook) started to promote people really fast, so other companies followed. Also managers gradually treated promotion as a tool to retain the people they need. Once that's the incentive, a long title ladder becomes a natural choice.

Doesn't it mean more like it's an acceptable end, a destination - obviously not everyone's career track is to take over the company as CEO one day, but nor is it necessarily to progress to Staff and beyond.

The idea being that it's a bit of a role change, to a greater extent than the levels before it which could be seen as advancement. Or, we've long had the idea of 'technical' and 'management' tracks, the more recent (I think?) idea here being that actually maybe they're both specialist tracks you switch onto, and you don't necessarily have to do either.

But I think, outside FAANG et al., whether companies subscribe to that sort of thinking is vastly more varied (or it's more niche) than titles and 'track' splits (or lack of them) already are.

Not everyone wants to move up. Some people are happy doing a job they're good at until the times comes to move to something else.

With the Peter Principle, it's implied that they were good at their previous job and are bad at their current one, but having had to debug awful, awful, broken code at Apple by people who had been promoted into managers or directors, I'm not convinced that they were ever good at their job. I remember some code we had in iTunes, my manager would say "that was written by X. Don't worry, he's been safely promoted out of danger".

I think management, especially higher management, is often about how much you can make it look like you're doing important things. It requires zero effort or skill to book a dozen meetings in Outlook or Google Calendar, and it only requires a fairly small amount of effort to make slide shows to talk about how "important" the work is that you're doing. Instead of getting good at engineering and writing good software, it's much easier and more effective to tell people how good at engineering and writing software you are instead. Most of the higher-level managers are pretty removed from the low-level work so when promotions come along, they remember the person who kept booking all the meetings with them and assume what they were doing is important.

I'm admittedly more than a little cynical about this stuff; I have been routinely negative about big corporations (and particularly Apple) and I think that the Peter Principle is assuming a level of rationality and intelligence that I really haven't observed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle#Definition Not saying I'm a huge fan of Scott Adams, but I don't know any other name for this principle.