I was an IC program manager. I was asked to manage program managers. I stepped back to become an IC within a year.

I did this because my team was immediately starved for engineering resources upon my appointment, I was asked to continue my IC product management responsibilities while managing the team, and I kept getting PMs that were the problem children of the group.

I went on to run product management for tooling and ops processes around that tooling in the post-manager PM role. I never looked back.

However, I got the bug so bad I left to start my own company, so now I manage everyone?

You probably already know this, but in case anyone else hasn't had this experience, learn from my mistake and think of it as "so now I manage these 4-5 leaders" instead of "so now I manage everyone". I thought this was the same thing, but I learned the hard way there's a reason middle managers exist :)

Anecdotally I've seen it quite a few times. In most cases, mentorship and the environment play a role in how successful you can be as an IC versus as a manager, and even within the same organization, the IC culture versus the Management culture can be drastically different and one or the other might not set you up for success.

That said, in my experience when there is a mass exodus of the kind you talk about, the underlying symptom is some flavor of poor management and toxic culture. Doesn't matter if that organization incidentally happens to implement something which would otherwise qualify as "best practices of management" - in that environment it is simply putting lipstick on a pig.

Opinions are my own.

I actually have seen the reverse. All the TLs I saw that stepped down to be ICs left their team shortly. It's obviously anecdotal, so I wouldn't generalize from that. On the otherhand, the TLs that switched to be a manager tend to stay in the teams much longer. Many of them openly said they don't enjoy managing, but that didn't seem to affect their decision to stay.

Do you know why they were unhappy? I could imagine reasons why, but wouldn't want to poison the well, so to speak.

I know, but I wouldn't be able to give much specifics due to privacy reasons. I can say that the common theme is dissatisfactions with the velocity of making decisions, leading to conflicts/frustration. In a large org, ICs are at the mercy of the management for velocity. When you step down from the TL position, you may feel pretty frustrated that your impact is now tied to some one else's (sometimes slow) decision. This feeling is already common between the normal ICs, but for TLs-turned-ICs, I think they experienced it much worse. All the people I knew burned out, complained about management, and left for another team or another company.

acronym: IC?

Individual contributor- not a tech lead or manager.