Most companies nowadays have evolved and have two distinct paths for engineers and managers.
I am pleased to see that to progress as an engineer you don’t need to become a manager. You can if you want to, but it’s not the only path. In fact, doing so is considered a transition.
It’s like being a Cloud Engineer and deciding to become a DevOps Engineer. Still working in tech, with a similar structure, both hard to describe to my parents 😅, and with different challenges.
So, much like this transition, becoming a manager is not a step up, it’s a lateral move.
Being a manager is not the only way to be an engineering leader. In the teams that I work with, I want everyone to be a leader! Each having a different level of influence but a leader nonetheless. Being a leader is not only championing technical skills but also behavioural ones.
For senior, staff, and principal engineers leadership typically means leading projects that span more than one team and being responsible for the technical aspect