You don't want to be a manager.

Theo (t3.gg) argues engineers should take management roles for communication skills, contradicting a viral article urging them to wait.

• Amazon increased IC-to-manager ratio by 15%; senior EM roles are disappearing, making the EM-to-VP path nearly nonexistent internally.
• Switching companies twice in two years can yield three or more promotions; staying at the same company rarely promotes you more than once every two years.
• Staff engineers switching companies earn 20-30% more than the typical EM promotion offer at the same company.
• ICs have more autonomy than managers or founders — Theo says he has less freedom as a company founder than as an employee.
• Never accept a counter-offer: the hiring manager blacklists you and your original employer stops trusting you.
• Communication skills built through management directly improve agentic AI prompting — specifying goals vs. tasks changes model output.
• Theo’s Codex agent beat Stockfish by misunderstanding the goal: it made Stockfish play itself, not build its own engine — fixed only by stating the goal explicitly.
• Theo’s final take: take the EM role if it resonates; communication skills compound across engineering, management, and AI workflows regardless of where the industry goes.

2026-03-16 · Watch on YouTube