>And in general, there are two ways to go. The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind

>And in general, there are two ways to go. The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work. And basically accept that the prime "getting shit done" years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now. 100% and this is far from being a FAANG thing (never mind that FAANG doesn't even exist anymore). My experience is mostly in startup and PE based companies and it's like that there as well. The majority of my managers have been non-technical, corporate continues to shrink the management layer to "save money" (line managers with 20+ engineers), support roles like project managers in many places have been eliminated, and managers seem to spend the majority of their day dealing with comms so organizing and managing the doing aspects of doing work have fallen to me as a Principal, Staff, Lead engineer. My role these days seems to be to come in and bring organization to chaos, mentor / teach engineering (not how to code but how to be a professional engineer), be a tie breaker on big technical decisions, and set the vision and direction for my teams. Most folks I know who wanted to stay doers topped out a Senior or Engineer II and chose to stay there. This is also likely to just increase or accelerate as the baby boomer generation (the largest working generation ever) who occupies a lot of leadership roles these days start to retire and leave a huge gap in qualified and ready candidates to fill the void. There just aren't enough of us so I expect we will see more and more folks press ganged into leadership that never really wanted that.