Yes. The moment you move from daily IC work to management your skills begin to atrophy. Even if you are magical and somehow they do not - you are not keeping up

Yes. The moment you move from daily IC work to management your skills begin to atrophy. Even if you are magical and somehow they do not - you are not keeping up/practicing on the newer developments. If you are doing your job as a manager it’s the scariest career possible. There is no realistic fallback to lower paid IC work after a certain amount of years. Your job is to enable others, not do things yourself. There are shades of grey and you try to keep skills at least honed a little here and there doing R&D and side projects - but it’s just not the same as day to day production line work. And of course some people start at a much higher baseline of skill than others. The impact is largely the same though over time. This is by far the single largest caution I give to skilled engineers who talk to me about moving into a management track. It’s a decision not to be taken lightly.