In the 2010s, if you had just been promoted to an engineering management role, you likely heard this phrase: 'You won't need to make any technical decisions anymore.' Before becoming CTO at Imprint, Will Larson served as CTO at Carta and Calm, and held engineering leadership positions at Stripe and Uber. He recalls being told exactly this himself back then.
Larson believes this 'rule' was not an eternal truth of management science, but a product of a specific economic environment. The Zero Interest Rate Period (ZIRP) created extreme talent scarcity in the tech industry, making the ability to recruit and retain top engineers the primary competitive differentiator between companies. In this environment, managers were expected to 'let engineers make technical decisions and get out of their way,' which was essentially a strategy to appease talent. Recruitment capability became the key factor distinguishing successful companies from failing ones, and a manager's value was redefined as 'creating an environment where engineers want to stay.'
However, Larson points out that this environment created a side effect: managers gradually lost their technical judgment because organizations no longer required them to use it. When he says, 'In the 2010s, we basically told managers they couldn't think about technical solutions,' he is describing not just isolated practices at individual companies, but a widely accepted management philosophy. Managers were left with only process tools, scheduling tools, and hiring tools.
Now conditions have reversed. The interest rate environment has changed, and the talent market is no longer as tight as it was in the 2010s; AI tools are changing the actual way software is developed, and technical decision-making is returning to management. Larson observes that companies are beginning to expect managers to be hands-on and dive into details. At Imprint, some of his best hires have been those who want to both manage teams and write code—the Tech Lead Manager (TLM) role is now in high demand, whereas a few years ago he wrote an article stating this role was a 'career trap.'
Larson made an extreme personal choice: stepping down from managing a team of 250 people at Carta to leading only 25 technical staff at Imprint. He calls this 'taking a step back,' arguing that the profession of engineering leadership will cease to exist within three years—at least not in the form he is familiar with. He advises mid-level managers either to return to line management and relearn technical skills or to consider retirement.
The boundaries of this judgment need clarification. Larson's 'three-year' prediction is based on personal observation and current sentiment, not measured industry data. Engineering management practices may evolve at vastly different speeds across different companies, technology stacks, and regions. When managing 250 people at Stripe, he faced specific constraints related to payment infrastructure; at Imprint, he faces a different set of constraints associated with an AI product startup. Conclusions drawn from one environment do not necessarily apply to all environments. Furthermore, he is currently recruiting for engineering management roles at Imprint, a conflict of interest worth noting: he advises managers to 'get back to doing hands-on work' while simultaneously hiring for roles that seek individuals who 'want to manage people and write code.'
Nevertheless, Larson's core explanatory mechanism—that management norms stem from economic environments rather than management theory, and thus become invalid when economic conditions change—provides a useful thinking framework for any engineering manager considering whether to 'get back to hands-on work': the question is not 'Am I falling behind?' but 'Does the economic premise underlying the rule I follow still hold?'