At some point in your life, you would receive the advice that you are better off to double down on being either an engineer or a manager if you want to progress in your career. The advice is typically given on good intentions but it tries to simplify a complex matter and in doing so loses half of the truth.
What the advice means is that when you consider the engineer/manager choice, you probably have been in the industry for a while and collected all the low-hanging fruits in your carrer. To proceed, you need a level of focus you have not experienced earlier. And as it is hard to focus on two hard things at the same time, you should choose only one.
While that is true, to perform at the peak level you cannot spread your effort all over the place, there is another half of the truth, that is the choice is neither binary or permanent. You are probably overthinking if you view the management as a critical, life-changing decision. The move to management is not a promotion, it is a change in scope of work in which you drop existing responsibilities to pick up others. And if you hate the new responsibilities, you can always go back to the engineering track. A good working environment is where you can move fluidly between tracks.
The higher you advance in your career, the stronger the element of leadership exists in your scope of work. For example, people in the technical track get promoted for working on hard and impactful problems. First, you wouldn’t get to work on the hard problems unless the easier ones were effectively delegated to someone else. Second, the most impactful problems tend to involve people of different background and function. Someone would need to rally them and align their interests to the shared goal. Yet delegation, communication, and goal alignment aren’t common practices among engineers. Although technical leadership is not the same as people leadership, you will navigate better if you have an opportunity to learn about how people think, how large projects are prioritized, and how organizations are run.
From our own experience, the best engineers learned to alternate between people management and technical management from time to time. In a hard project, they are err more on the engineer side to challenge their technical prowess. And in a more relaxing project, they are more of a manager so they can oversee the growth of their colleagues. They are better engineers because they know the red flags of a bad project and when to fire alarms. They are better managers because they understand the morale friction caused by a poorly planned project.
The final caveat is that engineer and manager roles exist in a spectrum and it curbs your professional and personal development by forcefully align your options with the extremes. Not only do most people find themselves somewhere in the middle, but they also move back and forth as their careers progress. People who can turn a technical advantage into a business advantage usually have a blend of engineer/manager in them. You can advance without spending time in management. But if you want to give management a try, you should. Do not let your identity be simply defined by a title.
