> There is NO such thing as hardcore engineer job position that doesn't involve a lot of management

So bizar. I've been in a few companies with senior "hardcore" engineers heads down in code, without management responsibilities.

> If you cannot do this, the industry will just close its doors for you.

Wait what?

A good engineering company will strive for a mix of seniority within teams of ICs. Some of these seniors may become "staff", which usually means, can talk tech stuff to the brass.

It only changes the kind of management responsibilities you're talking about. Yes, some positions will have zero employee management, however you'll be responsible for product management. There is no product in a big company that can be created with zero collaboration, so you'll be responsible for managing collaboration with other groups, determining features and getting ok from management, making sure that others are doing their work, etc. It is management nonetheless, sometimes with lots of meetings, just with a different goal.

Most companies are not "good" engineering companies. They are at best mediocre.

In my opinion this is a big reason software is so brittle, needs to be constantly patched and updated, and overall innovation in software moves very slowly. Having engineers do management work is undermining how hard engineering is -OR- underestimating how powerful software is.

In other words, the Idea is that engineers adds more value to a company if they also do all these management tasks, which implies that engineering is not enough and is not as valuable on its own - something I would contend because as we can see software is capable of amazing things like AI that will soon automate all these management tasks anyway. If companies invested in their engineers doing only engineering, then people could maximize their skills, and reach those new levels of productivity thanks to advanced software. Instead the industry limits engineers, and insists on them hitting a technical ceiling, effectively pushing them in a non-technical direction in favor of hiring younger engineers to do the "grunt work". Software engineering is only grunt work when you don't understand its true potential, and its endless complexity that takes a lifetime to master.

I see it in a completely different lens. Engineering is hard. Good engineering more so. What's even harder is to manage those projects well without having the technical skill to understand it. Whenever I find a technically challenging & innovative project, there's always a technical lead/manager that makes it all possible.

Of course, but that means (at least it should mean IMHO) that an engineer made a career switch into management, and those skills carry over and are valuable. I think when a company pushes their engineers to do more and more non-technical tasks, no matter how small, it basically says they don't value engineering and see software problems as a problem of allocating people and resources instead of investing in better engineers and giving them control to innovate.

I'm not saying managers are not necessary. It just seems like there is a pyramid structure, and managers are at the top. If you want to be on top of the pyramid you must evolve into a manager and let others do the engineering. I'm willing to grant this is ok in non-software companies, but in software companies it's bizarre and I'm even thinking software engineers should be unionizing and getting some representation.