Why Become a Manager

The “why” factor

Do you want to become a manager? What are your plans? What is the driving force that pushes you to make this career choice for yourself? You can’t rely on other people’s suggestions or expectations of you to answer that question. Instead, you have to dig deeper than that.

Story time

In my experience, many people learn this the hard way. I remember there was a high-performing engineer in one of my teams who expressed a strong desire to become a manager.

A year into the role, this person was miserable. He realized that he didn’t like his day-to-day tasks as a manager, and, as a result, he wasn’t very good at it. Later, he happily went back to being a senior-level individual contributor.

I had the opportunity to talk to this engineer to learn about his experience as a manager. In his own words, “I first had a tough ...