As a former engineer and now manager, it's not easier. It's different.

Like, yes I write much less code, but I also have to show much more empathy and be able to communicate with different people differently. Helping every engineer on the team advance their careers is tough, because everyone heard feedback differently.

Combine that with the one on ones where someone tells you about how shitty their life has been recently and how that's impacting their work. It's tough to go from roadmap planning to someone crying at you over a medical diagnosis to jumping directly to status updates to telling your boss no. It's an emotional whiplash not present in the engineer world.

Like I said, not harder or easier. Different.

I’m glad you made this comment. I’ve had multiple people lay out very personal and severe problems to me during one-on-ones. I’m in no way qualified nor did I sign up to have someone’s life literally in my hands (suicidal people). It’s disturbing.

Thanks for your comment. I'm pretty sick of the low effort takes on this site (read: internet in general). Every role is different. Each has its own challenges and anybody can be good or bad in a given role. Too many people trying to blame upper management, blame L1 managers, blame developers, without understanding, or even attempting to understand, the challenges they face. It doesn't just work like that. I'm 9 years into my career and became a manager 2.5 years ago. I agree entirely with you, it's just different, not better or worse. As a manager you are constantly dealing with a number of situations more varied than what you face weekly as a developer. The challenges are different. You can work harder, or work less hard, smarter or dumber...it's all up to the person and how their organization operates.

Personally, I think ICs complaining about bad Managers is acceptable. The latter have actual power and direct control over the individual’s career and life. It can be a tough job that comes with a lot of responsibility, but lots of us have faced the worst sides of this.

And if your reports hate you, you are failing at that hard job, your job.

Managers who manage like you describe devs should be tested are bad managers.

Size of the empire isn't something a manager does, it's a reward senior management gives. This is true unless the company has open allocation, as Google did before it started eating its own corpse.