It's interesting to watch the forces that determine how deep and wide management levels can get. I've fluctuated between first-level manager and IC a few times

It's interesting to watch the forces that determine how deep and wide management levels can get. I've fluctuated between first-level manager and IC a few times in my career. The driving force most recently has been that my manager accumulated too many people, and I was moved from a "team lead" or "project lead" to an actual people manager with a small team. When you're only managing 1-3 people, it's very easy to be asked to do this on top of being an IC, so it's a bit like the company getting a "free" level of management without the overhead. Of course, it never works out this way in reality, because your calendar fills continuously until you've gone from a maker's schedule to a manager's schedule. <http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html> Once you've hit peak calendar, it doesn't really matter how many people you manage any more, because your calendar can't get more full and you can't contribute less than zero individual work (ignoring countless Dilbert cartoons here). Does this help the company? Well, maybe. It does mean your managers at least have the context of the work of their teams much better than someone who was hired in. But do it too many times, and pretty soon it's easy to have more people in charge than you actually have doing work. Does it help the contributor who becomes a manager? In my experience, not really. It's a different career path, and it's a bit like starting over. The pay won't necessarily increase significantly, the responsibilities climb, and I think most frustratingly, you're no longer recognized for your technical contributions. I'm also not sure it's all that great for the ICs under a manager with a small team. The best managers I've ever had have been the people who can dedicate 100% of their time to, well, managing. They're the ones who can give me air cover, keep me out of meetings, intercept unnecessary requests before they get to me, make the presentations for the near-constant status update requests, etc.