👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
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Someone has been an Engineering Manager for a few years and although they’re good at it, and probably making decent money, they’re a bit tired of the role.
“Would it be stupid to go back to being an engineer?”
Life sometimes feels much simpler as an IC.
And apparently quite a few managers are thinking about it.
LeadDev’s Engineering Leadership Report in 2026 surveyed 600 engineering leaders and found that one in three managers are considering going back to being an IC.
That’s quite a lot, but I think there’s a question you need to answer before you do make the move.
Do you actually want it?
I think there are two reasons why someone might want to become an engineer again.
The first one is that you don’t enjoy management anymore.
You stopped caring about roadmap planning, performance conversations feel draining, you’re bored in strategy meetings, and you miss actually building things.
Fair enough.
There’s another reason which I find fascinating these days.
You actually still like being a manager (and everything that comes with it). You like helping engineers, being involved and in the details. You like contributing to the roadmap, and solving team problems.
You just don’t like doing all of these things at the same time.
Too much or too many things?
There’s some old research that I think explains this well. Robert Karasek published a paper in 1979 looking at two things: how demanding someone’s job is and how much control they have over how that work gets done.
What he found is that high expectations weren’t really the problem, but high expectations without much control were.
You can be completely fine with having a lot of responsibility but hate having no control over when any of it happens.
Gallup’s research found that 97% of managers also do individual contributor work, with a median of 40% of their time. Managers who were below that 40% mark tended to maintain higher engagement regardless of how many people reported to them.
So maybe having 10 reports instead of 7 isn’t actually what can tip you over the edge. Maybe it’s managing 10 people while also being half an IC, and jumping between all the projects your team is working on.
Gallup’s manager burnout research found managers are 67% more likely to strongly agree they experience a lot of interruptions at work.
Based on all this, I wouldn’t interpret “I want to become an IC again” as “I don’t want responsibility anymore”. You might want exactly the same amount of responsibility, but with just fewer things happening at once.
But, is it actually a demotion?
I think most career ladders and frameworks nowadays map pretty well that an EM has an equivalent IC role, typically somewhere around Staff Engineer.
So technically, going back to being an IC is not really a demotion.
And although many very successful people I know have done it, which turned out to be great for them, I do think that for many people it feels like a demotion
I’ve heard people tell me that going from Staff Engineer to Engineering Manager feels like progression, but going from Engineering Manager to Staff Engineer somehow feels like going backwards.
Atlassian even calls it a “voluntary demotion” (if they still stand behind this).
In my opinion Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager are genuinely parallel tracks, moving between them shouldn’t really mean moving up or down.
I think the important question to answer though is whether becoming an IC will actually solve the problem you have. The grass is not always greened on the other side.
There’s a pretty simple way to test that before making that decision that I like to recommend:
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