The Hidden Trap of the Default Engineering Career Ladder

In a lot of companies, the “default” career ladder in engineering is still pretty linear:

Write great code → become the tech lead → eventually manage people.

On a slide deck, that looks tidy. In real teams, it’s often how you burn out your best developers and quietly slow everything down.

I’ve lost count of how many sharp engineers I’ve seen make that jump. People who could untangle legacy systems, debug production under pressure, and be the person everyone pinged when things were on fire. They stepped into lead or manager roles, and over the next year you could see it: less joy, more frustration, and a slow erosion of the very strengths that made them great.

It’s almost never an intelligence problem. It’s a role problem. The work changes underneath them, and nobody sits them down to say, “You’re playing a different game now.”

The Invisible Skill Shift

Great developers tend to be good at one thing above all: controlling variables.

• You write code.
• You run tests.
• You debug.
• You fix the thing.

There’s a feedback loop. It’s noisy and imperfect, but it’s there. The system either behaves the way you expect or it doesn’t. You can see the result of your effort.

Step into a tech lead or manager role, and that clarity evaporates. Your “output” is no longer code. It’s:

• Decisions and trade‑offs
• Priorities and sequencing
• Guardrails and “we don’t do that here” rules
• The quality of conversations, not just the quality of commits

And here’s where strong developers get trapped: they try to lead the way they code. They look for the “right” answer to a people problem. They jump in and fix things themselves because it’s faster. They give more detailed explanations, assuming misalignment is a communication bug they can patch. That mindset works beautifully with compilers. With humans, it backfires.

Story #1: The Lead Who Never Really Stopped Coding

Years ago, I worked with a developer I’ll call Mike. Mike was that engineer. The one who knew where every fragile bit of the system lived. The one you DM’d when production looked weird. The one who could make impossible deadlines somehow work.

So when he was promoted to tech lead, everyone relaxed. “Perfect,” people said. “The expert is in charge.”

Six months later, nobody was relaxed—especially Mike.

• He was working longer hours than he’d ever worked as an IC.
• He was constantly context‑switching.
• The team was shipping slower, not faster.

The problem wasn’t that he stopped coding. The problem was that he didn’t.

• Any ticket that looked tricky gravitated back to his plate.
• Any architectural decision had to go through him.
• Any estimate he didn’t trust, he rewrote.

From his perspective, he was protecting the system and the team. From the team’s perspective, he didn’t trust them and was hoarding all the interesting work. And annoyingly, both perspectives had some truth to them.

Nobody ever told Mike that leadership requires a painful new habit: deliberately accepting “good enough” solutions from other people so they can learn, even when you’re sure you could do it cleaner and faster yourself. That’s not a JavaScript or Kubernetes skill. That’s an identity shift.

Your Job Stops Being “Doing”

One of the hardest truths for new tech leads: If you’re still the best problem‑solver on the team, you’re probably a bottleneck.

That sounds wrong to high performers. You’re used to being valuable because you can take the hardest thing and push it over the line. In a lead role, that reflex quietly caps the team’s growth.

The scoreboard changes. Your success is measured less by what you produce and more by what the team can produce without you in the middle of every decision. That looks like:

• Letting people struggle a bit (inside safe boundaries)
• Allowing non‑optimal designs that still meet the goal
• Coaching through a design review instead of rewriting it at 11 p.m.
• Repeating the same context five times without snapping

None of that feels efficient if you’ve spent a decade optimizing for throughput. To someone wired like a strong individual contributor (IC), that inefficiency feels like failure. But if you zoom out by six months or a year, it’s usually the only way out of “everything important flows through me.”

Story #2: “I Think I Made a Mistake”

Another example: a senior engineer I’ll call Sarah moved into an engineering manager role at a growing company. On paper, she was perfect: technically excellent, people liked working with her, and she actually cared about mentoring.

Six months in, she told me, “I think I made a mistake.”

She didn’t miss the status. She missed finishing things. She missed closing her laptop at the end of the day knowing she had shipped something real. Her weeks were now an endless loop of:

• 1:1s
• Performance reviews
• Hiring panels
• Stakeholder check‑ins
• Quietly defusing interpersonal friction

What wore her down wasn’t the hours. It was the ambiguity. In code, ambiguity is a problem to eliminate. In management, ambiguity is the environment you operate in every day. Nobody had framed it that way for her.

She eventually moved back into a senior IC role and did some of the best work of her career. Not because she “couldn’t hack it” as a manager, but because the way she wanted to create value was fundamentally hands‑on. That distinction matters. A lot of good people stay in misfit roles far too long because they assume “back to IC” equals failure.

Why Companies Keep Getting This Wrong

Most organizations still promote developers into leadership roles based on:

• Past technical performance
• Loyalty and tenure
• “Feels like the next step”

It’s easier than building a serious IC ladder. It’s cheaper than paying senior ICs like the force multipliers they are. And it lets leadership feel like they’re “rewarding” people without changing the structure.

But leadership is not a gold star for good coding. It’s a different job. When you ignore that, you reliably create two problems:

1. Developers feel pushed into roles they don’t actually want.
2. Teams get leaders who were never taught how to lead.

Nobody wins. The company loses speed, and the person in the role quietly wonders why they’re suddenly bad at their job.

What Good Tech Leadership Actually Looks Like

The tech leads and managers who age well in the role tend to share some traits that have nothing to do with being the smartest debugger in the room:

• They make peace with decisions that are “fine” instead of perfect
• They can explain why something matters without micromanaging how it gets done.
• They’re okay when their impact is mostly invisible to non‑engineers.
• They know when to stay out of the way.

Importantly, they’re at peace with their fingerprints not being on every important piece of code. If that sounds miserable to you, that’s not a character flaw. That’s useful data.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Saying “Yes”

If you’re considering a tech lead or manager role, ignore the title for a minute and sit with a few questions:

• Do I genuinely get energy from helping other people succeed, even when my own coding time shrinks?
• Am I okay being less central to the hardest technical decisions over time?
• Can I live with slow, messy, human progress instead of crisp, compiler‑driven feedback?
• Do I want responsibility when I can’t control all the inputs?

If your honest answer to most of those is “no,” that doesn’t mean you’re capped. It means you probably belong on a strong IC track.

Some of the most valuable people I work with:

• Influence architecture and strategy without having direct reports
• Mentor informally and unblock others in targeted ways
• Own critical systems end‑to‑end
• Quietly reduce risk through better designs and deeper thinking

Those careers are real. If your current company doesn’t see or reward them, that’s a company problem, not a you problem.

The Real Failure Is Pretending There’s Only One Path

The core issue isn’t that strong developers sometimes struggle in leadership roles. Of course they do. The work is different.

The issue is how rarely we say that out loud. We don’t talk enough about the emotional cost of leadership: the politics, the loneliness, the feeling that you’re always “in the middle.” We don’t normalize stepping back from management without framing it as a demotion. We don’t invest in career paths that respect the fact that not everyone wants to manage.

So people internalize the struggle. They assume they are the problem and are stuck because they believe what success should look like.

If you’re a developer looking at your next step, don’t start with, “What’s the next rung on the ladder?” Ask a better question:

How do I actually want to create value—and what am I willing to give up to do that?

Answer that honestly, and you’ll make better career moves than any default promotion track could ever offer.