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The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
A 5-minute essay arguing you can move between managing and hands-on work, more than once
Why it’s worth your time
Charity Majors's essay treats managing as a separate job you can step into and back out of, more than once in a career. She argues that the strongest technical leaders often do both in turns. It can help if you've been told managing is the only way up, or if you manage now and miss making things.
How to move between engineering and management
The essay · 5 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's short, casual and sweary, with tweets from Sarah Mei woven through. The sections on what a manager and a tech lead each need set up the part that matters most, the section called The Pendulum near the end.
- Write two lines for your next swing.
One line on what you want your current side, managing or hands-on, to teach you. One on the sign that would tell you it's time to switch, such as no longer getting better at it or dreading the work. Put a date about a year out to reread both.
Good moments for this: when someone suggests you should managea year or two into managingwhen hands-on work starts to feel like the same problem again
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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
Noticing which parts of your current work you'd hate to give up, and which you'd happily hand off, can tell you more about which side suits you now than the title on offer.
What might make this harder
Plan the return like starting a new job: relearn one current tool on a small piece of work first, and tell your new team you'll be catching up for a while. The judgment you built while managing tends to carry over; it's mostly the details that need refreshing.
Questions people ask
What is The Engineer/Manager Pendulum about?
It's a 2017 essay by Charity Majors, an engineer who has built and then managed infrastructure teams at early-stage companies. She argues that managing is a change of profession, and that moving back and forth between hands-on work and managing makes people stronger at both. She draws on her own career, on career conversations with engineers she'd been having, and on tweets from Sarah Mei, who was making the same case that day.
Is becoming a manager a promotion?
Majors says no: it's a change of profession, which is why she expects new managers to start out bad at it. She thinks calling it a promotion keeps people managing long after they've stopped wanting to.
How long should an engineering manager stay away from coding?
Her rule of thumb is that the best frontline engineering managers are never more than two or three years away from hands-on work.
What it says, and how it holds up
The choice tends to arrive framed as a one-way door: take the team, or stay where you are for good. Charity Majors pushes back on both halves. Writing in 2017, after several rounds of joining an early-stage company as one of its first infrastructure engineers, building the systems, then building and managing the team, and moving on, she argues you can keep moving between the two for a whole career. Her central claim is that managing is a different profession, with no rank attached.
The essay is most useful on what each side teaches. From a hands-on seat, she writes, working out how the company runs is mostly guesswork, and a lot looks pointless from there. Managing shows you how the business and its people work: hard conversations, getting good work from someone who's annoyed with you, and more conflict than you'd choose. It also takes away the small daily win of fixing something. She calls the manager who is also the tech lead an unstable mix, since engineering skills and context fade the longer you hold both, and she thinks you can only get better at one of the two at a time. Taking turns is where she thinks the breadth comes from.
If the itch behind all this is the one her essay opens with, solving the same problems over and over, a change of profession may be more than you need. A harder problem, a new team or a wider technical scope can sometimes answer it while you stay hands-on, and Will Larson's Staff Engineer is a good next read on that path.
She says herself that the cycle suits people who like early-stage companies. One outside study backs her complaint about management handed out as a reward. Economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue looked at sales workers at 214 firms and found promotions favored current sales performance over traits that better predicted who would manage well, which they describe as consistent with the Peter Principle. Where a manager's seat rarely opens twice, the pendulum can swing once and stick.
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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.