Worked at a consulting firm with just under 1k employees, when I started they only had like 40. At one point they had a meeting about creating a "technical tra

Worked at a consulting firm with just under 1k employees, when I started they only had like 40. At one point they had a meeting about creating a "technical track". I was in this meeting because I was interested in it. We went around for a while but they basically came back a couple weeks later saying that they don't have the resources to commit to having this track, and admitted they don't really know how it would be sustainable with our business model at the time, nor did they have anybody on the team who had experience with maintaining that kind of track and so it was killed. We did have the "stronger engineers" who occasionally may still get paid/compensated at a manager level even if they stayed at a slightly lower level not requiring management, but that was about it. They were also our "big hitters" when it came to putting them on the highest priority projects, and while by nature of consulting most of us were skilled in many different stacks, these people had a specialty that if a project came by that needed that skillset and was high visibility or priority, they were first pick to be on it. But you had to start managing if you wanted to continue to move up there. I actually ended up leaving because of this, even though they were honestly a great company.