Do you think a mediocre engineer can be a good manager?
Are the political skills required to schmooze your way into a high enough position to be a manager as valuable/more valuable than raw engineering expertise, when it comes to being a manager?
Good engineer and good manager are often orthogonal metrics. If manager has too strong of a technical opinion it may start micromanaging - not good. At the same time manager shouldn't be completely dumb and not understand deep technical problems
Good engineers are rarely ever good managers. Good managers are rarely ever good engineers. Managers deal with people. Engineers deal with code. Very different, somewhat related pathways.
Sad but a true reality.
How to be an engineering manager if you are a mediocre engineer?
I don't think either job is easy. Lazy manager bad manager. Lazy Engineer bad engineer.
The best managers are great engineers who are ok with not nitpicking and great people skills. The second best are decent engineers with great people skills.
Great engineers will always want to do it themselves. They won't understand why others don't already get it. Mediocre will listen and ask questions. They will respect your skill.
Sometimes mediocre will have some insecurities and exhibit toxic behaviors
There is almost no overlap between soft skills and technical skills
Great managers should let their reports drive technical decisions.
A great manager delegates tasks while a great engineer delegates authority.. may be a great leader.
I know at least 3 lifers at EBay who never wrote single piece of code are managers.
Absolutely. Being a great engineer doesn't make one a good manager. From personal experience, technically strong managers have been the worst "manager". They spend too much time obsessing over technical details that they don't need to review (that's what TLs should be doing). Which leaves them less time to grow the team, find projects, collaborations.