Engineering Managers: What's in it for you? What drives you to manage a team and not just be an Individual Contributor?

Worth mentioning, you don't have to manage to move beyond IC status. Teaching, mentoring, connecting people, all force multipliers.

@atheist I'm not a manager, but part of my tasks (maybe 25%) is mentoring. I like helping my colleagues get better at what they do, which might also lead to less headache for everyone when there's fewer time bombs in the codebase..
That said I don't necessarily consider mentoring/teaching as a management function.

@saucyatom exactly this.