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17 Reasons Not to Be a Manager
A 12-minute essay on the honest downsides of becoming a manager, from an engineer who has been one
Why it’s worth your time
Moving into management can look like the obvious next step up, when it's often closer to a new job with its own costs. Charity Majors, cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb, lists seventeen of those costs, from less control over your time to fewer jobs to move to, without arguing that nobody should manage. It's written for engineers, and much of it applies to anyone weighing a first manager role.
How to decide whether to become a manager
The essay · 12 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the essay.
It reads fast: a numbered list with replies from Twitter in between. Slow down at the points about joy, the emotional space the job takes up, and your time, and at her conclusion, where she says what she wants from anyone who asks for the job.
- Write down why you want to manage.
List your reasons as honestly as you can, including any about money, status or wanting to make the calls. Next to each, note which of her seventeen points would cost you most. If you can, ask a manager you trust what their last week looked like, and compare.
Good moments for this: before you apply for a manager rolewhen you're offered a teamwhen you're unsure about your next step
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Her argument leans on senior individual roles that carry real influence without managing anyone. If your company has no such track, the choice is narrower, and it's worth asking your manager what growth looks like without a team before you decide.
What might make this harder
Ask how pay and levels work for people who don't manage. If the honest answer is that they don't move, that's worth knowing, and it may point to other companies as much as to a job you don't want.
Questions people ask
Why would someone not want to be a manager?
Majors lists reasons including that you may already love your work, manager jobs are fewer and harder to land, the credit goes to your team while the blame lands on you, and your time stops being your own.
Can you go back from manager to individual contributor?
Majors's last point is that management will still be there later if you pass on it now. One reply she includes warns that going back to hands-on work can get harder the longer you're away. Both are worth weighing.
How long should you try management before deciding?
She suggests committing to about two years, because it takes that long to settle in and because switching managers often is hard on a team.
Who is Charity Majors?
An engineer and the cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb. She writes about engineering and management on her blog, charity.wtf.
What it says, and how it holds up
One question kept coming up in small groups at a 2019 meetup in Dublin, Charity Majors writes: why might a person choose not to manage? She answers from experience, including two and a half years managing at Facebook, and she sets her terms. She's writing about what comes with the job itself, assuming a reasonably healthy company, and leaves bad workplaces aside.
After a first point about loving the work you already do, the list turns practical: there are fewer manager jobs, they're harder to interview for, and in her view they're among the first cut when times are hard. Later ones are personal: the steady satisfaction of fixing problems fades, other people's needs take up emotional room, and your calendar fills with meetings. Running through it is a hopeful thread, that most of the enjoyable parts of managing, like mentoring and running projects, can be done without the title.
It's an engineer's essay from 2019, and some of it has aged. Her point that experienced engineers find new jobs easily reads differently after the tech layoffs that began in 2022. She offers no evidence for her claim that managers are cut first, and she says plainly that her guess about how long managers stay in a job has no data behind it. Her request that you be honest with yourself about why you want the job doesn't depend on the market.
If you've been managing for a while and the question is whether you're good at it, a list of reasons not to start won't help much. That's a question for the people you manage and your own manager, asked as a request for advice on what to do differently.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.