TLs: Track switching considerations and getting pushed off technical tracks.

As you move up a ladder, you might experience a weird phenomenon: your “soft” skills start to matter a whole lot more after you spent years proving your technical chops. As more and more of your job becomes coordinating or leading a larger group of people, those technical skills are still important, just no longer sufficient. Especially if you’re someone who started with a lot of those soft skills to begin with, you might start getting offered different forks in the road like being asked if you want to switch job ladders. 

I’ve had engineers offered jobs as Program Managers or Product Managers, only to scoff at the idea of being “pushed” to less technical ladders. I’ve had engineers tell me if I ever approached them about management that they’d probably just quit. I’ve had other engineers ask for help charting a path to ladders that pay more or offer more growth. There are always varying degrees of confidence in their responses and their flexibility on what the path forward looks like.