Manager jobs are significantly more stressful and harder to train for than individual contributors. And my personal opinion is that good managers are much rarer than individual contributors.
It really depends on how much the manager throws themselves into their work. I’ve had a few really good ones that I felt were actually helpful and the vast majority that just go to meetings and completely fail to isolate their team from chaos.
Yes absolutely. Managing a manager is hard. Objectives and accountability are easy to get muddled because their tasks are all people based. I am still looking for a practical and resource-efficient way to manage.
It's also much more difficult to get better at managing people than getting better at engineering. Although I suppose if you're a really good manager that may not be true.