The Swallowed Energy

His desk chair is too big for him, somehow. Not physically-he’s a broad guy-but psychically. It swallows the sharp, focused energy that used to make him bounce between three monitors, compiling code while simultaneously arguing syntax in a Slack channel. Now, Alex leans back, his fingers tracing the cheap vinyl edge of his managerial seat, staring at a screen filled with code he didn’t write.

He clicks into a pull request submitted by Sarah, who is far better at Python than he ever was, even when he was ‘the best.’ Alex scrolls, his lips tightening. He sees the efficiency, the elegance, and he feels the familiar, hot twist of uselessness in his gut. His brain automatically reverts to Individual Contributor (IC) mode: That loop could be tighter. Why use that library? I could do this in 13 lines.

The Flawed Promotion System

This is the paradox that breaks high-performing teams: the over-promoted manager.

We don’t promote people into management because they demonstrate aptitude for leading, coaching, or strategic thinking. We promote them because they are the best at the job we want them to stop doing.

It’s a reward system, a necessary ladder in organizations that only know how to compensate loyalty and brilliance with positional authority. We punish our rock stars by giving them the title they think they want, then we punish the rest of the company by taking away the rock star’s real contribution and replacing it with a bottleneck.

The Perfect Peel and the Real Job

I’ve been Alex. I accepted a managerial title once, maybe 13 years ago, because the alternative-staying purely technical-seemed like stagnation. It felt like rejecting the prize. I spent 233 days of that year feeling fundamentally dishonest, reviewing spreadsheets I didn’t care about, desperately missing the tactile satisfaction of making something work. That obsession, that need for control and perfection, doesn’t disappear when the job changes. It just shifts targets.

I remember peeling an orange once, obsessively, trying to get the entire rind off in one perfect spiral, without a single tear. It took me maybe 3 attempts to get it right, and in the end, I had achieved a useless, precise perfection while letting the kettle boil dry. That’s what Alex is doing to Sarah’s code. He’s trying to find the perfect peel in a job where his role is now to grow the tree, not manicure the fruit.

We need to stop using management as the only reward for excellent technical execution. The only metric that should matter when moving someone from IC to Manager is their proven ability to derive satisfaction from the success of others, and their desire to engage in the deeply uncomfortable work of confrontation, feedback, and organizational politics.

Valuing the Craft

The ultimate irony is that the moment Alex became a manager, the company lost their best developer, and they gained a profoundly unhappy, mediocre supervisor who hates meetings and spends 153 minutes a day wishing he could just close all these tabs and push one perfect commit.

Imagine if the specialized team at Floor Coverings International of Southeast Knoxville decided their best designer should stop designing and instead spend 43 hours a week in budget meetings.

The Final Question

Because Alex doesn’t hate his team; he hates his job. And the tragedy is, he was simply too good at his old job to keep it.