This isn’t the most fruitful time in the tech industry to aspire to be a technical manager, with companies looking to increase the number of direct reports per manager and decrease the layers of management in their company. See for example:
Meta Platforms Inc. is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as it tries to become more efficient[…] The process is known internally as a “flattening”
However, the managers with newly larger teams, and even their managers, often don’t agree with upper management that their load is reasonable. And there are still pockets of growth within flat or shrinking companies and the management of those pockets still may not be allowed to add managers to accommodate it.
With lower formal demand for managers but continued informal demand for them comes increased opportunities to exploit would-be managers, or former managers, by making them “shadow managers”. Here’s how it looks: