After straddling the line of IC to EM to CTO in orgs from 1 to 25k employees over the past 20 years, I have to say the truth of engineering management failure is so much more nuanced and subtle than what is portrayed here. Yes, there are plenty of power-hungry blow-hards and clueless pointy hairs without a lick of talent, but I honestly believe the majority of managers are trying to do a good job, but ultimately it's a really really hard job and the failure modes are extremely diverse. As an IC you might not have visibility to even properly judge the situation. There are questions of strategy, communication, priorities, performance management, micro-managing, giving someone more than they can handle, technical debt vs velocity, quality balance on critical code vs leaf-node code, individual strengths and weaknesses, bus factors, overall morale, cross-functional differences, strategic priorities, cost centers vs profit centers, business landscape, difficult but talented people, easy-going but over-committing people, capable but unmotivated people, etc.
To paraphrase Tolstoy: all happy teams are alike, but every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.
The dizzying list of competing priorities is a great way of showing how much a manager must juggle.
I'm not a manager but an IC leading projects at a FAANG company. The engineers are very competent and my responsibilities are a fraction of a manager's and yet I really struggle with many of the things in your list.
For example, the capable but somehow-unable-make-solid-progress engineer who's been in this mode for 2 years and nothing I (or others) have tried has got them out of this.
My current manager is great and also very transparent about everything they do; this has given me new-found respect for a difficult and thankless role.
Out of curiosity, what are the tasks you are supposed to do in your position and how different are from a manager's or a - let's say - project manager's? Thanks!
As an IC, I lack authority and have to rely more on influence. A good manager relies on influence by default but some things are very hard to achieve without some authority (as distasteful as it may seem).
For me, getting folks to pull in the same direction consistently over a long period of time is hard. Getting folks to appreciate why doing this thing rather than another (because business value) is hard.
And I am well aware that I can and do also make life hard for my manager in exactly the same way! Humans are hard.