I disagree with this article. If you, like the author of this article, spent 13 years as an IC, perhaps it is OK for you to focus on acquiring the soft skills

I disagree with this article. If you, like the author of this article, spent 13 years as an IC, perhaps it is OK for you to focus on acquiring the soft skills required to be an efficient engineering manager. After 13 years as an IC, you have a pretty good perspective on what it means to be an IC, how to identify valuable team members, how to assess their skills, how to identify blockers and facilitate solutions, and most importantly, how to classify technical problems, how to analyze requirements, how to plan, estimate, communicate on deliverables and releases, etc. If you have the hard skills, it's fine to spend most of your effort growing your soft skills. But if you don't have the hard skills, you'll have to focus on that as well. You can delegate things to different team members, but at the end of the day, the responsibility is still yours. Team members can "own" things, but you're still responsible if they don't execute. And in order to do that efficiently, you have to be prepared to ask the right questions to the right people, and that requires hard skills.