OP is not saying to starve out management. Providing a meaningful career track for experienced engineers as technical experts rather than managers does not requ

OP is not saying to starve out management. Providing a meaningful career track for experienced engineers as technical experts rather than managers does not require reducing the number of managers. It does, however, require accepting that there's such a thing as a non-management job that might actually pay more than one higher up the org chart. Often, organizational and technical challenges are intertwined. We become susceptible to certain technical pitfalls because of the unique weaknesses of our organization and its technical leadership (or lack thereof). I concur that many senior engineer roles will look like management. One thing that distinguishes them is that the senior engineer is not involved in the minutiae of HR decisions that line managers make for their employees (salary & promotion, approving vacations, etc.) nor in the broader allocation of corporate resources that consumes so much manager time, but rather on high-level but still distinctly technical tasks. In my industry (power engineering), it is very common to see giant engineering companies that have gutted the senior engineer role. They are made up of hordes of interns and junior engineers and lots of hotshot bosses and nothing in between. The quality of work they can produce suffers noticeably.