That is because what he wrote is not most or actual managerial job. Yes, managers needs good social skills. But those are not defined as "be pleasant to all the people all the time". It is more of "be able to negotiate and push for what you want when you wont be punished for it". Accomplishing more and more wont get you there. Guessing right when to demand what you want and going for it, including leaving when current company is not cooperating, is what gets you there. Even as real manager of multiple people, others will try to stack more and more on your team. And you have to negotiate and push back - but not when the person you are pushing back would retaliate.

Make following exercise: how many managers you know are actually spending much time with "helping people solve their problems" or "patiently answering dumb questions"? Managers I know spend some time with it, but frankly, much less then analysts and not much more developers.

Another exercise: Do you know managers that are unpleasant around, arrogant or misinterpreting people? Do you know managers who are actually not good at all at communicating down chain? Because I know a lot.

what the exercises show is that none of that pleasant communicating to all has to do with who is actually successful as manager or selected for management.

You are describing politics (in other words, status seeking). It happens everywhere, even at IC level, but I agree most of it happens in management.

Yet, politics is not the same thing as managing.

Engineers tend to conflate politics with toxic politics, and that's a source of a lot of confusion.

Toxic politics are everywhere, but the ability to negotiate, navigate the organization, find what make people w/ authority tick, is crucial to any successful manager.

Large organizations are constantly trying to decide what to do and how to do it. It does this by consuming information at every level of the hierarchy making decisions and then pushing that information up and down the hierarchy. (Obviously lots of information is translated along different lines than the written down org chat)

Politics is how every organization makes decisions. It's understanding the information flow, the decision making process, people incentives, and how to influence these to get the outcome you want.

Managing up is about altering decisions made above your level (info moving up) and managing down is about taking those decisions made above your level translating them into decisions that affect your team.

i.e. Managing is very much about politics.

Politics is huge part of managing. It is not just status seeking either, but yes, important part of it is status managing. You cant do successful managing without doing a lot of politics - towards people under you, towards people over you and especially a lot towards peers.

Engineering has politics too, just different kind of politics. You also spend a lot less time explicitly doing politics. But, a lot of what is going on in code reviews for example are dominance games and status managing. How you present yourself so that they perceive you as technical the right way matters too.

It is usually easier to become a manager within your existing company, compared to starting with an EM role.

If that has not happened to you even after being clear, it can mean different things. It could be that you are within a group that has little growth, and does not need a new EM. Some political reasons. Maybe your manager is terrible and does not seek opportunities for you. etc...

In this case, my advice would be to join a mid size company which has growth, and you join as a senior engineer. Startups can be another way (that's how I did it), but that's more difficult to plan. I certainly did not plan it this way myself.

I applied for a job that was the position I wanted. I feel like you'd probably have more luck doing that than trying to convince a company who seems to be getting a lot of value out of you doing what you're doing.

It's usually pretty difficult to get hired for a management role without any experience. Most of the time you break this dependency loop by being promoted internally first.

Send me your resume (contact info in my profile)?

I am aggressively hiring EMs, and will definitely consider first time managers.

>>> Businesses stacking an impossible list of responsibilities on one person until they burn out and leave

From that and your whole post, I'd take a guess that you are a top contributor easily getting more and bigger projects.

My advise would be to stop getting more responsibilities. It has to be done by your end, you need to not do anything more.

There's some more work coming up? Don't take it, don't get involved in email threads about the new projects/tasks. They will find somebody else to do the work. They want you to be oncall after hours? Don't do it, phone is off.

Good fast workers are a magnet attracting more and more work until they burn out under the load. Look around you and notice people doing no more than they are required to, learn from them, it's the only way to last more than a few years at any place.

I really, really like the business I work for and when I was offered a chance to manage the dev team (was a team lead/senior developer - been a dev for 20+ years) I took it. I have written enough code. I wanted to be in a position to get projects done for the business. To facilitate the work, to help guide it, to be a manager that programmers could work with. And so far, so good. I am way more stressed out than ever but this is my own making, and I am learning to live with what is ultimately a different kind of stress than you experience as a dev.

I really like the comment about "would you do it for the same money". If the answer is no, you are probably better off not doing it.

question, are you a white guy? I find too many techies have trouble with managers who are not, and too many companies are willing to let quiet bigots be bigots.