Senior engineers face a fork in the career path: management track or technical track. Both offer growth, impact, and advancement. They require different skills and provide different satisfactions.
Understanding each path helps you choose wisely.
The Engineering Manager
Engineering managers lead people. Their primary job is enabling their team to do excellent work.
Responsibilities
People development: Hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, mentoring.
Team health: Building culture, resolving conflicts, ensuring sustainable pace, maintaining morale.
Delivery: Ensuring the team ships quality work. Removing blockers. Coordinating with other teams.
Process: Establishing and improving how the team works. Sprint planning, retrospectives, communication patterns.
Stakeholder management: Translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders. Setting expectations. Reporting status.
What Managers Don’t Do
Write much code: Some managers write code, especially in smaller organizations. But as team size grows, coding time decreases. The team’s output is your output.
Make all technical decisions: Managers set direction and provide input, but technical decisions often rest with tech leads and senior engineers.
Do individual contributor work: Your job is enabling others, not doing the work yourself.
Skills Required
Communication: Constant communication—with your team, with leadership, with peers, with stakeholders.
Emotional intelligence: Understanding people’s motivations, recognizing problems early, handling difficult conversations.
Prioritization: Many demands, limited time. Ruthless prioritization is essential.
Delegation: Getting work done through others. Knowing what to delegate and what to handle yourself.
Context switching: Managers context-switch frequently. Deep focus time is rare.
Satisfactions
- Seeing people grow and succeed
- Building high-performing teams
- Scaling impact through others
- Organizational influence
Challenges
- Less hands-on technical work
- Frequent difficult conversations
- Responsible for others’ failures
- Always on (no “finishing” tasks)
The Tech Lead
Tech leads own technical direction. Their primary job is ensuring the team makes good technical decisions.
Responsibilities
Technical direction: Architecture decisions, technology choices, technical standards.
Technical quality: Code review, ensuring quality, addressing technical debt.
Technical mentorship: Growing other engineers’ technical skills.
Technical representation: Representing technical perspective in planning, estimation, and stakeholder conversations.
Some coding: Tech leads typically write significant code, though often on high-leverage tasks.
What Tech Leads Don’t Do
People management: Performance reviews, career development, hiring decisions usually rest with managers.
Process ownership: While tech leads influence process, managers typically own it.
Extensive stakeholder management: Tech leads engage with stakeholders on technical topics but managers handle broader relationship management.
Skills Required
Technical depth: Deep knowledge in your domain. Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs.
Technical breadth: Understanding of adjacent domains. Ability to see how systems connect.
Communication: Explaining technical concepts clearly. Documenting decisions. Writing proposals.
Influence without authority: Convincing engineers to adopt approaches when you don’t have management authority.
Systems thinking: Seeing the whole system, not just individual components.
Satisfactions
- Shaping technical direction
- Solving hard technical problems
- Maintaining hands-on involvement
- Growing engineers technically
Challenges
- Influence without authority
- Balancing coding with leadership responsibilities
- Being accountable without direct control
- Managing technical debt versus feature pressure
Choosing Your Path
Self-Assessment
Energy source: Do you get energy from technical problems or from people interactions?
Natural tendencies: When problems arise, do you want to solve them yourself or help others solve them?
Patience: Are you patient with people’s growth, or frustrated when others don’t keep up?
Satisfaction: What work achievements have made you happiest?
Try Before You Commit
Management: Take on mentoring, lead a project, act as team lead while manager is away.
Tech lead: Drive a technical initiative, own a system’s architecture, lead technical decisions on a project.
Experience reveals whether the reality matches your expectations.
It’s Not Permanent
Paths can change. Managers return to IC roles. Tech leads move to management. Career paths aren’t one-way streets.
But transitions have costs. Skills atrophy. Network shifts. Restart expectations. Make thoughtful decisions rather than casual switches.
Hybrid Models
Some organizations combine roles:
Tech lead manager (TLM): Combines both roles. Common in smaller organizations where dedicated roles aren’t feasible.
Advantages: Unified technical and people leadership. No coordination overhead.
Disadvantages: Both roles suffer from divided attention. Neither gets full focus.
As organizations grow, role separation usually becomes necessary.
Career Growth in Each Path
Management Path
Individual Contributor → Team Lead → Engineering Manager → Senior EM → Director → VP → CTO
Growth comes from:
- Larger team scope
- More teams
- More organizational influence
- Strategic responsibility
Technical Path
Engineer → Senior → Staff → Principal → Distinguished → Fellow
Growth comes from:
- Broader technical scope
- Harder problems
- More organizational influence on technical direction
- Industry recognition
Both paths offer advancement, compensation, and impact. Neither is inherently superior.
Common Misconceptions
“Management is the only way up”
Mature organizations have parallel tracks with equivalent compensation and level.
“Tech leads are managers lite”
Tech leads have distinct responsibilities, not a subset of management responsibilities.
“You can always go back”
You can, but it’s not trivial. Skills atrophy. Expectations reset. Plan transitions thoughtfully.
“Managers don’t code”
Some do, especially in smaller organizations. But coding shouldn’t be your primary value as a manager.
Key Takeaways
- Engineering managers lead people; tech leads own technical direction
- Managers develop people, build teams, manage stakeholders; tech leads shape architecture, maintain quality, provide technical mentorship
- Choose based on what energizes you and your natural tendencies
- Try aspects of each role before committing
- Both paths offer growth, impact, and advancement
- Paths can change, but transitions have costs—decide thoughtfully