Speaking as a current manager (by choice): No! We don't need more reluctant managers in engineering, they do enough damage as it is. Management should be a str

Speaking as a current manager (by choice): No! We don't need more reluctant managers in engineering, they do enough damage as it is. Management should be a strictly personal choice, and it should be easy to bail out of if it turns out you don't like it after all. We seem to be exiting the exponential growth stage of our industry, which means we're past the point where shoehorning people into management made any kind of sense. If we hit something approximating steady state then we'd expect 1 engineer to transition to management for every ~4 engineers who don't, which means what's actually needed now is a clear career path for the 4/5 who don't need to and don't want to be managers. > technically, if you do want to perform at the very best, interacting with other people is not avoidable This is a weird line to include, given that OP didn't mention anything about not liking interacting with other people. Management involves a lot more than interacting with other people—many introverts make great managers and many extroverts make terrible ones.