The quiet crisis in engineering leadership: Why great engineers make terrible managers — and what to do about it

By: Enitan A. Awosanya

The technology industry promotes its best engineers into management and then wonders why teams stop shipping. This is not a talent problem. It is a structural one — and fixing it starts with being honest about what leadership actually requires.

There is a ritual that plays out in technology companies with such regularity it has become invisible. An engineer distinguishes herself: she solves hard problems cleanly, earns the trust of her peers, and ships things that matter. So her company rewards her — with a promotion to engineering manager. Within eighteen months, she is miserable, her team is underperforming, and the company has quietly lost one of its best engineers while gaining a mediocre manager.

I have watched this happen more times than I can count, across startups and scale-ups, across fintech and SaaS. It is one of the most predictable failures in the industry. And yet we keep doing it.

We keep promoting people into roles that bear no resemblance to the ones in which they excelled, and then expressing surprise when things go wrong.

The Myth of the Natural Progression

The assumption underlying the traditional engineering career ladder is that management is a natural next step — a kind of seniority made official. It is not. Engineering and management are not points on a continuum. They are different disciplines that happen to share a domain.

Great engineering rewards clarity of thought, deep focus, and the ability to hold complex systems in your head. Great management rewards the opposite: comfort with ambiguity, the ability to operate effectively across many shallow contexts, and a willingness to derive satisfaction from outcomes you did not personally produce. These are not merely different skills. For many people, they are psychologically incompatible.

The engineer who is happiest and most productive in a state of deep flow — who does her best thinking in three-hour uninterrupted blocks — is being asked, as a manager, to spend her days in back-to-back thirty-minute conversations about other people’s problems. The transition is not a promotion. It is a career change. We just rarely tell people that.

What the Research Tells Us

The academic literature on managerial derailment — the phenomenon of high-performing individuals failing after promotion — has documented this pattern for decades. Studies consistently show that the technical and individual competencies that predict success as an individual contributor are weakly correlated, and sometimes negatively correlated, with the interpersonal and contextual competencies that predict success in management.

There is also a motivational dimension that organisations rarely account for. Decades of research on self-determination theory suggests that people thrive when their work satisfies three core needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. For an engineer, competence is built through technical mastery — the satisfaction of understanding a system so completely that you can bend it to your will. Management transfers that work to other people. The manager’s job is to create the conditions for her team’s competence, not to exercise her own. For engineers who drew their deepest professional satisfaction from technical problem-solving, this is not a trade-off. It is a bereavement.

Promoting someone into management is not a reward. It is a bet — and the industry has spent decades ignoring the odds.

The Costs We Refuse to Count

The consequences of this structural failure are significant and systematically underestimated. The most obvious cost is the engineer herself: a person who was thriving is now struggling, and in many cases will eventually leave. But the second-order costs are equally serious.

A reluctant or underprepared manager frequently defaults to the one skill she is confident in: technical judgment. She over-involves herself in implementation decisions, re-litigates architectural choices her team has already made, and inadvertently signals that she does not trust the people she is supposed to be developing. The team, sensing this, stops bringing problems to her early — which is precisely when intervention would be most valuable. Technical debt accumulates. Morale declines. The best engineers on the team, who have options, begin to look elsewhere.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the dominant failure mode I have observed across organisations of every size and stage. The costs are real, they are predictable, and they are almost entirely avoidable.

What Good Looks Like

The solution is not complicated. It is merely difficult, because it requires organisations to dismantle the assumption that management is the only form of seniority worth rewarding.

The companies that get this right have built genuine dual-track career ladders — not the token “principal engineer” role that exists on paper but in practice offers no path to the kind of influence and compensation that management provides, but real parallel structures in which deep technical expertise is valued, compensated, and celebrated on equal terms with people leadership.

They have also invested in honest career conversations. Not the kind where a manager tells a high-performing engineer that the “natural next step” is management, but the kind where someone sits down with that engineer and asks: what does your best day of work feel like? What do you want your career to look like in five years? Where does your energy come from? These are not soft questions. They are the most strategically important questions an engineering organisation can ask — because the answers determine whether you are about to double your leverage on a great engineer or accidentally destroy her.

Finally, the best organisations treat management as a skill that requires deliberate training — not something that capable people can simply pick up. They invest in structured management development programmes. They pair new managers with experienced coaches. They create forums where managers can share difficulties honestly, without the performance anxiety that so often prevents people from admitting they are struggling.

A More Honest Conversation

The technology industry prides itself on rigorous, evidence-based thinking. We write post-mortems for system failures. We A/B test button colours. We instrument everything.

And yet when it comes to one of the most consequential and recurring failures in our organisations — the systematic misplacement of talented people — we continue to rely on intuition, tradition, and wishful thinking.

It is time for a more honest conversation. Not every great engineer wants to be a manager. Not every great engineer should be a manager. And the organisations that are willing to say this out loud — and build systems that reflect it — will not just retain better people. They will build better products, because the people building them will be doing the work they were actually meant to do.

The question is not whether your best engineers can manage. The question is whether you have the courage to ask them if they want to.

Awosanya is a software engineer and technical co-founder with experience across fintech, startups, and technology consultancy.