[foobarian]

It's probably the case that he could've stuck with being an individual contributor. I don't know about Google but the tech shop I work for has paths explicitly for the introverted engineer types who don't care for the drudgery of managing people. This is invariably a lot harder in academia, as getting to tenure pretty much requires one to act as a startup founder-- do all the business dealing, run a team, get funding, etc.

Given that Matt did get tenure he clearly is really good at such managerial roles, and probably couldn't help but step up. I bet Google leadership try very hard to get people to do management--it's not easy, on the contrary engineers don't like it and it's a fight to get the good ones to step up. I would bet too that the managerial type things at Google are a lot more fun than the academic ones.