Many companies have a "manage or be managed" environment, in the sense that you're either on a narrowly-defined team doing drone work, or you're a boss man. Th

Many companies have a "manage or be managed" environment, in the sense that you're either on a narrowly-defined team doing drone work, or you're a boss man. The appeal of being a manager to an engineer is the ability to allocate projects and work on the interesting stuff. Of course, very few managers get to actually do that-- it might be the 5 percent who have managerial titles but few or no reports, all of whom are pretty self-motivated.