alt Hacker News> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.
This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions, 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them cool stuff, it would be wonderful.
Many companies have different career tracks for managers than for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for what senior ICs can be recognized for.