Dave’s knuckles are a bloodless white as he grips the dry-erase marker. He isn’t writing; he’s clutching it like a life raft in a storm of human expectations. We are 19 minutes into a weekly sync that was supposed to be about roadmap alignment, but the air in the room has the heavy, ionized taste of a looming thunderstorm. Someone just asked about the conflicting priorities between the design team and the backend engineers, a classic people problem, and Dave has responded by launching into a 29-minute monologue about microservices architecture and why the latency on our primary database is peaking at 49 milliseconds. He is brilliant. He is the best engineer I have ever known. And as a manager, he is absolutely, devastatingly miserable.

He doesn’t want to be here, and by ‘here,’ I don’t just mean this meeting room with its lingering scent of overpriced espresso and stale anxiety. He doesn’t want to be in this role. But in the perverse logic of modern corporate hierarchies, being the best at ‘doing’ is the only path toward ‘leading.’ We take our high-performers, the ones who find solace in the clean logic of code or the predictable flow of a spreadsheet, and we punish their excellence by forcing them to navigate the messy, illogical, and often heartbreaking terrain of human emotions. It is a systemic misallocation of talent that creates a ceiling for individual contributors and a basement for the teams they are supposed to inspire.

The Binary Trap

Camille… sees the world in vectors. To her, a great developer being promoted to a management role is like taking a high-speed rail line and suddenly deciding it should also function as a public park. The core utility is destroyed, and nobody actually enjoys the park.

In our company, there were 9 levels of seniority for engineers. Once you hit level 9, the only way to get a raise or a bigger title was to take on ‘direct reports.’ It’s a binary trap. You either stop growing, or you start managing. We act as if management is just ‘Engineering 2.0,’ a natural evolution of technical skill, when in reality, it is a completely different craft. It’s the difference between being a master carpenter and being the person who has to convince 19 carpenters to stop arguing about which hammer is best and actually build the house.

The Dopamine Deficit

When you are a star individual contributor, your feedback loop is tight. You solve a problem, the tests pass, and you feel that hit of dopamine. It’s clean. In management, the feedback loops are measured in quarters, if not years. You might spend 129 days coaching an employee on their communication style only for them to quit for a 19% raise elsewhere. There is no ‘green light’ for human development.

Instead, he’s stuck in a world of 59 shades of gray, trying to mediate a dispute between two developers who both think they’re the smartest person in the room. This creates a culture of resentment that trickles down. A manager who hates management will inevitably neglect the ‘soft’ parts of the job…

The Cost of Forcing Growth

When we force specialists to become generalist leaders, we lose 239% more than we gain. We lose the output of the expert. We lose the morale of the team. And eventually, we lose the person themselves as they burn out under the weight of a role that contradicts their internal wiring. I’ve made this mistake myself. Years ago, I pushed for a promotion for a brilliant researcher named Marcus… Within 149 days, he was a ghost of himself. I had taken a thoroughbred and hitched it to a plow.

The Final Observation

Camille T.J. actually ended up leaving that firm. She realized her color-coded files were a defense mechanism against the chaos of a poorly managed department. She told me she felt like she had finally stopped trying to swim upstream. It’s a lesson we all need to internalize. Expertise is not a ladder; it’s a landscape.

[The most expensive mistake a company can make is turning a world-class asset into a third-rate administrator.] We must stop treating management as the ‘final boss’ of a career. It is a side quest for most, and a primary mission for very few.

I look at Dave now, still standing at that whiteboard. He’s finally stopped talking about the database. He’s looking at the marker in his hand as if he doesn’t recognize it. The team is silent, waiting for him to address the actual human conflict that started this whole diversion. He looks tired. Not the ‘I worked late’ kind of tired, but the soul-deep exhaustion of someone who is pretending to be someone they aren’t, 49 hours a week, every week of the year.

We owe it to the Daves of the world to let them be great at what they love. We owe it to ourselves to stop being managed by people who hate management. Why are we so afraid of letting experts remain experts?