Here's how I see it: Ideally a manager / reportee relationship is a symbiotic relationship. A manager becomes more successful by making their reportees more successful, and both roles grow together. And repeating this across teams, the whole company grows as well.

There's a lot of nuance but here's a simplistic overview: a manager tries to land a big project for their team, which lets the team stretch their abilities and grow, which over multiple successful deliveries results in promotions / raises for everyone involved AND the cachet to ask for bigger projects (and more headcount!)

The manager's role is the hustling and jockeying in landing the project, ensuring their team is executing and getting any mentorship needed (directly or indirectly) and protecting them from disruptions ("shit umbrella") -- which includes managing everything around the team including stakeholders and dependencies and escalations -- and then making the case for promotions / raises / PIPs based on their performance.

I've never been a manager, but having been involved in all these aspects, I can tell you none of this is easy. All of these can get very contentious, even in the best-run of companies; in the rest, a lot of pathologies spring up (like politics and empire-building) that cause even more nastiness.

So it may seem like they're taking credit for your work, but that's literally part of the arrangement, and it's only unfair if you're not seeing any upside. If you feel that way, this is 100% something you should bring up (very tactfully!) in a 1:1 or (even more tactfully!!!) a skip-level.

Until you are dealing with a difficult employee or struggling with whether to put someone on a PIP or being asked to deliver things you don't have direct control over or dealing with penny-pinching edicts from above etc. etc.

Engineering Manager can be a social role with some tech aspects.

You attend meetings, negotiate deadlines, evaluate people, navigate project minefields, take decisions or force people to take them,... and the technical aspects are quite minimised.

Depending on the company this is not an upgrade, it's a lateral move. I have people under me who earn more than me, and I agree with that.

The job it's not easy, it's different. Spending 5 hours on meetings it's easy, but exhausting. Giving credit to your people but taking the blame (which is what should be done) it's easy, but demoralising. Not having a peer group of people with whom easily socialise makes the job feels lonely, when you talk with other managers it's 99% work related, and you can't make your people like you as a person.

Most days I'd love to have a clear objective.

One of the worst is the strange feeling that you have because you've studied for a long time some skills, and worked using them, and now those are hardly used. You need to use a set of skills that you haven't trained for, and haven't used as much (depending on your personality/skillset, of course).

Being a manager is not for everyone.

I've jumped back and forth between IC and Management. The roles are measured on completely different things. Most of IC is about through put. Most of management is about building/doing the right thing (aka making money).

Sometimes, it can look like management is doing very little because you only see the tail end of their outputs to the team.

On the front of it he's not a very good manager for the team then.

Once you get to leadership you're giving credit where it's due and soaking up the loss.

Sorry to hear that. From that description this person does not sound like a good manager.

I'm a freelance interim EM and I do it for the same reason the article explains: I genuinely enjoy it.

I love engineers and I love tech. I still code daily but I'm not the guy that delivers at the pace of some of the amazing engineers that I had the privilege to work with. I love putting others ahead of myself wherever I can and it's never cost me anything, so I'm not afraid to do it again. I love telling the engineers how what they do actually matters because they're too focused on the work to sometimes see why changing goals doesn't mean their work and efforts were wasted and I also love shielding them from the corporate mess upstairs (that I somewhat masochistically don't even dread being part of)...

So, yeah, I really love my job and if one of my guys (or gals) wants that too, the more of a joy it is to me to mentor them into that process.

Are you saying principal engineers and tech minded PMs make lateral moves into director level manager without going through being entry level EMs first?

I've never heard of something like that. Usually the requirement for being director level manager of engineers is to at least have managed people as an EM for several years before.