I've held a number of roles in tech from IC to sales to engineering management to product management and now back to IC. The problem with engineering managemen

I've held a number of roles in tech from IC to sales to engineering management to product management and now back to IC. The problem with engineering management is that its difficult to quantify the things that make someone a good technical manager. I'm not even sure its always the same set of things in every organization. So its very easy for there to be many really bad EMs hiding in plain sight at places like Google and Meta. Its just really difficult to tease apart what an EM's contributions to team success actually are, and whether a team's failures and successes are even properly laid at their feet when there are so many confounding factors. I went back to being an IC because its so much easier to take the blame and praise for my work when I'm just coding. I wouldn't mind doing sales again either. But I don't ever want to manage a large team again. There's just too much bullshit ... and I'm also old now (nearly 50) and I feel like a lot of new engineers don't understand what having a job means within an org. Yes, I know you want to work on interesting things all the time, but sometimes all you get to work on is unexciting stuff. Its a job.