The more time passes, the less interest I see in line manager (aka m1) roles. I've been m1, m2 for some time, then ic, then m1 again. Now that I'm being on trac

The more time passes, the less interest I see in line manager (aka m1) roles. I've been m1, m2 for some time, then ic, then m1 again. Now that I'm being on track to be m2 again, I think I'll just drop the towel and get back to ic. The only thing that's been keeping me from doing so so far is that I never had a manager I actually deemed competent in that they were trying to understand the underlying technical aspect of the job in a way that actually helped me as an ic. The only ones I have liked were those just leaving me alone. The impact of bad management is marginally lesser for managers themselves, and at least I can try to do some good in my team. But the admin cost of line management, added to having to deal with people's emotions all the time, the context switching, constant interruptions, politics and general vaporware BS remove any true possibility to be "strategic", or genuinely have time to coach people through anything significant. I find the effective job closer to a mix of hr, with exec admin role, with catchall person who needs to produce the decision juice when people don't want to. It's just not worth it. I also really dislike the notion of being "promoted" into management. It's another profession altogether. You're not promoted, you're transferring. At best its a graduation if you actually succeeded in some form of training. But let's get real, people get slapped with a manager title, and one in a thousand will care enough to open a book or even just a blog post about anything related to learning the job. Most new managers are "trained" by a combination of their own clueless bosses, and inspirational memes on LinkedIn telling you should be a leader rather than a manager. Stop pretending there is a real notion of hierarchy between managers and ic, managers are equally incompetent as anybody else (well, that's not true, they tend to be worse since lots are driven by ego and power hunger rather than a genuine interest in the job), thinking that it is a promotion is stupid.