I think managers purposely chose the managerial path because they didn't like to code or found it harder to do with age. The way I look at coding is equivalent to cleaning your house. It's a lot of grunt work, with a fair bit of motivation required, and most importantly you are required to have faster legs. As a technical engineering manager, I have cleaned the room once so I know how to clean the room. But I think it's beneath my social status to clean it. Hence I hire people inferior than me (either due to age or race or lack of social capital) to do the cleaning job. I know what places need to be cleaned. I also know what needs to be cleaned. I can verify the output of the cleaning exercises done by my reports. I can also verify the quality of the cleaning work. I can also find the slacker who cleans the slowest. As a manager I just need to know what needs to be cleaned which is easy if I know my charter or product or domain. But I won't do it myself. I will hire people to do it. So in other words some Godfather above me has enabled me to get into a white collar job and empowered and enabled me to get workers to do the cleaning work. That's why a lot of people leave software engineering and become product managers or engineering managers. The vulnerable with no social capital end up being relegated to the blue collar coding work.
I chose coding because I'm not a psychopath that trashes people's lives for a living. I sleep better at night. In my 15 years of sde, I only met like 5 people that were genuinely deserving of pip, yet we have yearly pip mandates that put everyone through misery. And let's face it, with agile and being forced to act from anything like, scrum master, project planner, developer, QA and so on, every software engineer that has 5 years under their belt can also act like a manager, needed be.
Do you like Uber?
I think there's a lot you can learn from people who've been in the industry for a while. Your summary of being a manager is focused on overseeing the technical work of others. That's at most 30% of the job, if you're doing the whole job and doing it well. Mentoring. Coaching. Feedback. Career development. Conflict resolution. Identifying cross-team opportunities. Promotions. Hiring. Firing. Identifying strengths. Figuring out who works well together on projects and who doesn't. Being a shit umbrella instead of a shit funnel. Pushing back on stupid low ROI asks from Senior Leaders. Betting you badge at least once a year to stick up for your team. Holding your PM, UX, Designer counterparts to a high standard. Yes and looking at code occasionally.
30% of the job is technical and that's probably the only hard thing. The rest of it frankly is much easier for the human Brain to do and process. It's the programming part that's hard for average human.
Sure. My point is that maybe people love the other 70% of the role, and they're attracted to that part. Maybe it's less about their ability or desire to do the 30%, and more about being attracted to the 70%.
"...that's probably the only hard thing.". -- classic refrain of the engineer who has never spared a thought for how organizations succeed and thrive. Great managers don't grow on trees, but based on how many engineers have been laid off in the last 18 months, there's not an acute shortage of those. The people problems are the hard ones, because people and organizations rarely work like neat mathematical abstractions.
Omg, cleaners I mean coders must be lining up to be in your team!
That depends totally on the type of company. The smartest engineers keep job hopping and leave the corporate nonsense for managers. These are the people at startups, pre-ipo companies, often founders getting funding etc. To grind so hard at large companies where there are layers and layers of management just pushing responsibility down is a loser game - so is becoming a manager and constantly vying for another promotion, constantly competing with peers and comparing/sizing people.