I would expand this to the curse of the software industry. You spend 10+ years studying and specializing in computer science and technical matters only to have this be underestimated in the industry by structuring the organization such that moving up the ladder means conforming to company values and increasing managing tasks and people at the expense of practicing your technical specialty.
This is implicitly making a statement about the practice of software engineering, in that it has a kind of a ceiling that orgs expect people to reach and after reaching that ceiling the only way to continue growing in productivity is to manage others to do the same work. From my perspective this is a fundamental misconception that keeps the quality of the software artificially low such that it can be worked on by an army of low-level engineers. Instead of scaling software by using more software, which would require experienced engineers, orgs like to scale software by hiring new engineers that lack the domain context and so the org is doomed to constantly re-write and reinvent the wheel (within the business domain) over and over.
I wish the software industry appreciated the potential of software a lot more. If they did this, every year of experience within a domain would come with expectations to have less bugs, faster iterations, and so on, instead of more "leadership" which is often just a way for companies to get people to enforce the status quo company values. It is no surprise there is a subtle hint of cult thinking in all these large companies, and people are not valued for their skills and output, but rather for their ability to adhere to the rest of the org. I agree with the proposed solutions, which are starting your own company or finding one that will let engineers do what they do best.
This is implicitly making a statement about the practice of software engineering, in that it has a kind of a ceiling that orgs expect people to reach and after reaching that ceiling the only way to continue growing in productivity is to manage others to do the same work. From my perspective this is a fundamental misconception that keeps the quality of the software artificially low such that it can be worked on by an army of low-level engineers. Instead of scaling software by using more software, which would require experienced engineers, orgs like to scale software by hiring new engineers that lack the domain context and so the org is doomed to constantly re-write and reinvent the wheel (within the business domain) over and over.
I wish the software industry appreciated the potential of software a lot more. If they did this, every year of experience within a domain would come with expectations to have less bugs, faster iterations, and so on, instead of more "leadership" which is often just a way for companies to get people to enforce the status quo company values. It is no surprise there is a subtle hint of cult thinking in all these large companies, and people are not valued for their skills and output, but rather for their ability to adhere to the rest of the org. I agree with the proposed solutions, which are starting your own company or finding one that will let engineers do what they do best.