While my friend was offered a bump with the promotion to EM, the total compensation was less than the offers he received for Senior/Staff Engineer at other star

While my friend was offered a bump with the promotion to EM, the total compensation was less than the offers he received for Senior/Staff Engineer at other startups. "At other startups" is the important bit here. I assume 'startup' means less than 100 people, at which point it switches to 'scaleup', but whatever definition you use the question should really be 'When does an EM actually start being useful?' Startups don't really need EMs because they don't really need managers at all. There is a strong expectation in a startup that the staff there are capable of managing themselves, plus there are usually fewer business functions that developers need to work with. Where an EM is useful is in a larger business that has many competing demands of engineering teams: features, roadmaps, BAU, KTLO, tech debt, compliance, etc ... it's a long list. There's a necessity for someone to manage that, and support the teams to be doing the right work at the right time, without letting standards slide, and to support the team to navigate and negotiate the political maze of multiple stakeholders wanting their thing to be priority #1. I've been an EM for a few years and I would not recommend someone takes an EM role in any company that has less than 70-100 staff (assuming about 1/3 is engineering). Once you get to that scale I think the role starts getting interesting, and valued, but if the company is smaller it should be managing those processes fairly easily already. If it isn't then that's a signal there's problems with the way the business works that an EM probably can't solve because they're rooted in the business's leadership culture.