[bluGill]

On the other hand people smart enough to be engineers are smart enough to be in management so if that is your interest the world has a lot of people who for whatever reason can't won't do management. While managing other engineers is a way in, once you are in management you can do run a factory or a construction site and those often are places where workers cannot break into management.

[galangalalgol]

There are a lot of different types of intelligence. I have met many brilliant developers that made horrible managers. And I have met many developers that we joked they moved to management to protect the codebase, that turned out to be great managers. That is a good point though, that many jobs don't have paths into managing those same jobs.