It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.

The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.

There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:

In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.

The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.

I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.