The leadership transitions nobody warns you about
Most engineering career advice treats the leadership track as a ladder where each step is a slightly bigger version of the one before it. That metaphor is the reason so many career transitions go sideways. IC, manager, director, and VP are four different jobs. Each has its own failure modes, its own definition of what counts as your work, and its own relationship to the code. The skills that earn a promotion to one level are rarely the skills that make someone effective at the next.