Should You Work As An Engineer or Manager?
Should you work as an individual contributor (such as a tech lead) or as a manager?
If you’re a tech lead who hasn’t managed people
Say yes to any new opportunity that comes your way, and do it for two years. A new job often requires you to reinvent yourself. Do so wholeheartedly. When you do anything new, you’ll be frustrated at times. Stick with it. After two years, if you still don’t like it, you can go back to your earlier role.
Sometimes people make the mistake of trying to figure out if they like it before doing it. That makes as little sense as deciding if you like an onion dosa before eating one.
If you’ve played both roles and thinking about what’s right for you
Do you want your core tech skills to develop further, or atrophy from disuse? These are the foundation of an eng leader, and there are a lot of people in tech who are useless because their foundation has disappeared.
Are you a craftsman? Do you get satisfaction from building things with your own hands, as opposed to merely coordinating other people's work? Or, on the other hand, do you derive satisfaction from the outcome and not the process of getting there? Are you equally happy if you achieve the outcome by delegating and coordinating?
Do you want to work on technical problems as an engineer, or people / political problems as a manager?
Managers have to juggle too many balls at once, taking care not to drop any. If that sounds stressful, and you prefer to go deep, work as an engineer.