(*: For clarity - EM = Engineering Manager, IC = Individual Contributor)<p>I recently transferred to a team with an explicit intent for me to be an EM on that team. A few months down the road they said I wasn't meeting expectations because of my "time management" which had too many meetings and lacked focus time for IC work - which definitely was not my 50%+ focus. I'm "winning" the resulting political war (my last 1:1 left my lead in tears), but only in the limited sense that I'm not getting fired; it's been a bit of a disaster for everyone.<p>The unclear expectations of what gets someone an EM role and what is expected of that role is the root of my problem, some of the author's, and a lot of the industry's as a whole.<p>Leaders are picked from those that are truly focused on tech and truly excel at it... and then told not to do that. How can somebody be "intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome" of tech work and then suddenly be expected to stop doing it?<p>I should have been that rare counter-example in that I got picked for this role because of my very visible leadership in other areas. However, when it came time to give me the position formally they fell back on code output and found it somewhat lacking (specifically, the number of commits I made while onboarding was less than those of my established teammates).<p>There's a school of thought that switching back and forth between IC and EM tracks lets you build a lot of knowledge and be both better manager and IC (the author evidently did). While I do think experience with each helps you do the other, there is a cost to that focus shifting. This isn't like the cost of only being able to code in 45 minute blocks. It's the cost of shifting the things you care most about entirely.<p>Most managers fail to ever make that shift. Even if they manage to hold themselves back from coding (not all do), their heads remain in the code. One sign is when, in response to impossible expectations from above, they try to come up with technical solutions (e.g., if only we redesigned this module we could meet these impossible deadlines). If your mind is focused on tech, it's the tool you use to solve every problem. Another example is when team members have no idea how to move their careers forward and don't know expectations. A tech focused lead won't be thinking about how a new project is actually the perfect challenge for a more junior employee; their head will be figuring out the best way to solve the task technically.<p>An EM is not a tech lead. It's not just a different skillset, but a mindset change.