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phil21yesterday at 9:34 PM0 repliesview on HN

Yes. The moment you move from daily IC work to management your skills begin to atrophy. Even if you are magical and somehow they do not - you are not keeping up/practicing on the newer developments.

If you are doing your job as a manager it’s the scariest career possible. There is no realistic fallback to lower paid IC work after a certain amount of years. Your job is to enable others, not do things yourself.

There are shades of grey and you try to keep skills at least honed a little here and there doing R&D and side projects - but it’s just not the same as day to day production line work.

And of course some people start at a much higher baseline of skill than others. The impact is largely the same though over time.

This is by far the single largest caution I give to skilled engineers who talk to me about moving into a management track. It’s a decision not to be taken lightly.