If you’re an engineer at a company where becoming a manager is considered a promotion, then you only have three choices: become a manager yourself, or leave, or resign yourself to being a second‐class employee. It should be obvious — you can work through the math using three sock puppets — that this is an arrangement that pushes a company inexorably towards mediocrity. The best engineers either leave the company or try their hand at management, often with doubly disastrous consequences: they simultaneously lose the company a great engineer and gain them an awful manager.