2026-03-19 - "Makers Only", or: EM -> IC
March 19, 2026
I’ve heard from 1011 12 different EMs in the last few months: what do I do with my career now that AI is around?
I had the same question for myself about a year ago. I had been a manager for 8 years at that point. I was increasingly frustrated and exhausted. My stress levels were at an all-time high. And yet, I felt like there was nothing to my job.
So, I made the switch from EM → IC. I did this because:
- AI let you “just do things” and output the code of 10 people, and I wasn’t “doing things”.
- I got into engineering management to be empowered to get things done and ship things.
Now, I felt increasingly less “blocked” (i.e. needing to organize people) to ship things. The speed of getting things done was limited by the speed of my own ability to elucidate clear ideas into writing.
- I got into engineering management to be empowered to get things done and ship things.
- The most rewarding part of being an EM was sitting in a room, jamming with someone on building something, whether it was a new product, an improvement to our platform, or something else. I wanted more energy for that.
- My job was increasingly about managing personalities and people, and less about doing great work.
- It drained me to deal with difficult situations involving my people: difficult feedback I needed to deliver week after week, challenging performance management situations, mediating disagreements.
This drained me too much to actually have “maker time”. Even though I had more hours in the day, I didn’t have energy left in the day.
- It drained me to deal with difficult situations involving my people: difficult feedback I needed to deliver week after week, challenging performance management situations, mediating disagreements.
AI rewards makers. Tech is shifting even harder to an insatiable appetite for “makers” and an even smaller appetite for “managers”. I believe longevity for management careers means preserving the “maker” skill.
“Maker” is orthogonal to IC or EM. It is purely about where you spend your energy. ICs are inherently makers, because their personal output is tied to their performance. But you can also be a VP of Engineering who sleeps on the factory floor with their team, day in and day out, working through design challenges. That is a maker, regardless of their formal title.
So, my personal advice, based on my own job, to managers is:
- Make sure your job lets you be a maker. Whether you’re currently in a management role or seeking a new one, ensure it involves this.
- In most management jobs, you get to define your own role. Just make sure it doesn’t saddle you with so much managerial overhead that you can’t do something. “Be T-shaped”.
- If your job doesn’t let you do this, consider becoming an IC.
I don’t think this is particularly groundbreaking insight, but I think it’s always been true that managers should:
Minimize the “manager” work. Manager work refers to “the things around the thing”, like: coordination, people management, “planning” longer than a month or two.
Give people more agency and independence; minimize your own direct involvement. Your team should be able to make nearly every decision without you.
Focus on clarity: clarity of your expectations of execution and outcomes. Refine this aggressively.
Value your time as a tradeoff to maker time. You might be an emotional shoulder for your team, but that weekly 2 hour 1:1 for emotional support is not worth it. Meetings that could be an email, should be an email.
Also, that email doesn’t need to be 3 pages; try making it 3 paragraphs, or 3 sentences.
Do more of the “maker” work. Put simply, maker work is: decide what to do, then do it.
Do things on the side. Exercise your own creativity with side projects. It could even be building something in service of simplifying your management job. Or a fun personal tool you wish you always had. But, it must be building things.
Some manager work can be reframed as maker work. If someone asks you for a 6-month plan, a somewhat common answer could be “we don’t know yet, but it’s something in this space, and we’ll build and refine a prototype and check-in every week.” That gives you more time to just do the thing.
Express yourself through prototypes. Then, as you do this, develop your technical intuition on how to turn these into productionized systems.
Take a significant builder role in something on the team. Find a significant product or feature to independently build. Don’t delegate away all the builder work. If you’re not able to find anything to do, you either 1) have too many people on your team or 2) don’t have big enough ambitions.
If you’ve tried this and it’s not working, consider being an IC. I switched to IC because I couldn’t get the “manager” work down to below 50% of my time.
Aside: I think the best “people managers” that will survive are the people who are natural networkers and talent magnets. These are people who will pull a crew of 25 talented people anywhere they go. These are exceptionally rare. I get too much social anxiety to be good at this. If this is you, ignore me.