Because a manager manages. Having weekly 1:1s with 8 direct reports is not “high bandwidth”. That’s normal bandwidth. 1 engineer doing all that on their own is

Because a manager manages. Having weekly 1:1s with 8 direct reports is not “high bandwidth”. That’s normal bandwidth. 1 engineer doing all that on their own is incredibly high bandwidth. Also, a high bandwidth engineer building all that is way more valuable than a manager building a team to do it, in terms of bottom line. Sure managers are important and good ones produce results. But that’s not equivalent to a 10x engineer. That’s just the normal expectation for a manager.