u/Head-Win412

Not sure if other EMs have noticed this but a lot of engineers angle for management for reasons that have almost nothing to do with management and it worries me.

Most treat it as the obvious next rung. You've maxed out the visible IC ladder and management just seems like where you're supposed to go, so you chase it as a promotion, a status bump, a pay increase, without asking whether you actually want to do the thing itself.

Because a lot of folks picture management as senior engineering with authority. The reality is close to the opposite. You mostly stop coding. Your wins go invisible, a well-run team just looks like nothing went wrong. And you become the person who absorbs everyone else's problems: performance issues, conflict, burnout, the brilliant person who's quietly about to quit, roadmap chaos from above, usually with less authority than you imagined. It's a people job in an engineering context, not an engineering job with a bigger title. Plenty of great engineers try it and hate it and that's fine, it's just a different discipline.

What makes me skeptical is when someone wants in purely because the IC track stalled or the money's better, with no real interest in developing people. If someone got more satisfaction from unblocking their team than from their own commits, I'd take that seriously. I've gone as far as I can as an IC so I guess I'll manage is a different thing and a lot of people learn that the hard way, then feel trapped because stepping back feels like a demotion.

So where do other EMs land? Are you seeing this too?

Trying my luck because I remember seeing this tool mentioned somewhere in this subreddit a while ago but for the life of me I can't find the post anymore. From what I remember, it wasn't one of the usual names like Jira, ClickUp, Monday, Asana, etc. It was a smaller PM tool that people were recommending because it combined Kanban and Gantt really well.

The things I remember people mentioning were: Kanban and Gantt stay in sync, good dependency management and milestones, visual planning without feeling overly enterprise. I've gone through so many old posts and comments that they're all starting to blend together.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

i got into civil because i liked the problem-solving. the design, making something actually work in the real world, seeing a project you drew get built. and i still like that part. but somewhere along the way the job became like 70% process and 30% actual engineering and nobody really warns you about that going in.

my week now is QA/QC redlines, chasing agency review comments, resubmittals, coordinating with the other disciplines whose stuff never quite lines up with mine and logging every fifteen minutes against a charge code. i'm supposed to be the engineer but a huge chunk of my time is production and admin and the actual design thinking gets squeezed into whatever's left, usually after 5.

and the deadline thing kills me. someone puts together a fee proposal that assumes a clean scope, no revisions, the client knows what they want and the agency turns the review around on time. then reality hits. the client changes the layout at 60%, the geotech comes back different than assumed, the city takes eight weeks instead of three and comes back with 40 comments and somehow i'm the one explaining why we're over budget and behind, like i'm the reason the scope grew and the reviewer sat on it.

so i spend a real portion of every project defending a schedule and a fee i didn't set, to a PM or client who's never had to actually crank out a plan set and get it through review. meanwhile the engineering, the part i'm actually good at and the part that carries the liability once i stamp it, is what gets rushed.

i don't think i'm burnt out exactly, i still like the work when i'm actually doing the work. it's the gap between what i thought the job was and what it turned into that wears on me.

so how do you all deal with it? do you have a way to keep the admin and production from eating the whole day or is it just accepted that real design happens on your own time?