[thoughtspile]

Not saying management is harder than engineering, at all. It's just another nice big area to learn something new.

Big companies tend to be quite prescriptive about role boundaries, so if you're an FE engineer, you can learn design and provide input as much as you want, but you won't likely get to design a new screen from scratch instead of your regular designer.

I mean, over the last few years as an IC I fiddled with CI setups and automated QA, wrote some CLI codegens, but after some time you really notice you start inventing problems to have some fun.

[whstl]

You're mostly right, but: depends on your manager.

I do let my FE engineers do mockups when they want. It is often objected by other people who wanted to do it (but didn't) or wanted someone else to do it (but didn't have time). But whoever is trying to make me and my team's job hell, will get the same treatment from me.