Comment by saltcured

For a lot of folks, the derivation of joy is not as scale-free as seems necessary to move up the hierarchy in this way. The jump in abstraction kills some joy by removing the tangible process. The tactile enjoyment someone gets from knitting is not there when operating a loom, much less when managing someone else who operates the loom.

The change in agency also kills the joy for me. I thrive on abstraction in the language and mathematics sense. But I do not at all enjoy indirection and delegation through unreliable agents. I am not interested in the loss of control and the new risk management task. I would never accept a "stochastic compiler" that offered to optimize my code but with risk of randomly changing the semantics. That determinism in the semantics needs to remain for me to accept a tool as a valid abstraction.

For context, I am a computer scientist by title and a programmer at heart. I got my CS degree from a liberal arts program rather than an engineering school. My temperament is more that of a hands-on artist at an easel or typewriter and not that of a manager of an engineering department. In my long career, I have thrived with peers or betters on collaborative projects. I have zero interest in "advancing" to a managerial role.

But honestly, the loss of control, lack of trust, and associated risk management is a big problem for me. I have rarely delegated work to less skilled or less reliable juniors, and I have never enjoyed that. The scenario of a confidently wrong subordinate is a huge trigger for me. It evokes long term trauma from growing up with a mentally ill family member. It feels like all of the burden of being a caregiver to someone with delusions, but with none of the moral context to make that worth the cost.