On Wednesday I applied for the manager position at my current shop. The old manager turned in his two weeks notice and left last month. They're interviewing two people who applied internally and two externally.

I was also asked by my director and VP if I was interested in the tech progression track. Instead of going to Manager -> Director, it's Lead Engineer (what other's call a Principal Engineer) -> Architect.

Being a Lead Engineer would mean I wouldn't report to my director. I'd report to my VP ... who fired the last architect (head of devops) while my manager was on his 2 weeks notice. The old architect had been there 5 years and had once reworked an entire system over a weekend to fix massive performance issues that kept truck orders backed up for over a day, by moving everything from Mongo change streams to Kafka.

I would also have to go in to the office 3 days a week as a manager, like a savage! (all the devs are fully remote).

I'm in my 40s and don't want to stay a senior engineer forever. I think I'd rather manage people than do more coding, but the politics of this company are some of the worst I've seen; and I've worked in 6 different cities across 3 countries.

One of the other engineers is just quitting to do freelance/contracting because he can't stand how the company treats people.