[dasil003]

As someone who's spent 25 years straddling the IC/EM line in companies of all sizes, I can tell you unequivocally that management—especially engineering management—is not easier.

I think it's fair so say that gross incompetence is easier to recognize in a programmer than a manager, especially to the untrained eye. It's also true that a well-functioning team may be easy to run and the manager shouldn't have to do much except not fuck it up.

But at any kind of scale, all problems are people problems, and there are never ending systematic dysfunctions and organizational problems. Everyone can be making a valid claim to doing their job, yet the output is nowhere near what it could be. These types of problems can be difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to unsolvable at the high end. One must be technical enough to understand the details, able to zoom out and understand how costs of various paths interact with UX, operations, security and other concerns, and then say the right things in the right venues to nudge people in the right direction while also maintaining the morale and agency of all the ICs who do the actual work.

It is brutally difficult, and the reason most EMs are bad is not out of malice or sociopathic tendencies (though I will say the emotional toll is high for non-sociopaths which is probably one reason they are disproportionately represented in management and executive leadership).