This is also true of my own employer (a fellow FAANG) - the technical track is incredibly hard to advance in past senior, it seems to incentivize devs moving in

This is also true of my own employer (a fellow FAANG) - the technical track is incredibly hard to advance in past senior, it seems to incentivize devs moving into management, along with the pay differential where even in the same tier, management makes a little more in general by a couple of $10k. I very much enjoy being a dev and am a top performing one in my VP’s org, but the structure incentivizes me to switch over to the management track, which I’d be happy to do (I have prior experience as one), but it seems like a crappy way to depress salaries of ICs that they are forced to switch companies to move up to where they should be.