I was pushed into the role due to an acquisition from the position of a technical contributor CTO. My experience: It's brutally hard and utterly unrewarding. A

I was pushed into the role due to an acquisition from the position of a technical contributor CTO. My experience: It's brutally hard and utterly unrewarding. A good manager is evaluated by the performance of their team and the happiness of their team, but most companies do not even collect metrics on team satisfaction other than the mostly discarded of "peer evaluations". This tends to create a toxic environment where abusive managers who exploit their employees rise to the top and equitable and compassionate managers are forced out or given no real opportunity. I've also never been offered, and in fact have been refused, any engineering management training. I asked, and folks say it's "too expensive." They offer some books (the wrong ones, usually), but I think they (subconsciously or consciously, idk) recognize that performance of the team is a lot more important. The final thing is even if you do it for awhile and start to get better at it (as has been the case for me), it begins to infect people's expectations of you in the technical world. Everyone assumes you'll start to do it. In some part because you train yourself to adopt a manager's attitude of calm and promote the idea that "yes, this is fixable we don't need to panic." Once you do it, it will follow you around.