It's also hard for those Googlers who want to do it to be given the chance, unless already senior enough on the technical ladder to correspond to the top 20% of

It's also hard for those Googlers who want to do it to be given the chance, unless already senior enough on the technical ladder to correspond to the top 20% of technical people at Google (a far higher bar than the technical competence required of a manager). Source: personal experience circa 2013-2015, when I was there and trying to transition from individual contributor and tech lead to first-time people manager. Of course I wasn't considering executive roles like this article is about.