I agree to a certain extent, mainly that it is a matter of appeal and it's about finding the right match, etc. That said, I can't help but think there is value

I agree to a certain extent, mainly that it is a matter of appeal and it's about finding the right match, etc. That said, I can't help but think there is value being lost by thinking engineers need to scale their productivity by managing more people rather than by managing more software. Software is inherently about automation and abstraction, and the possibilities are limitless as we are witnessing with recent AI breakthroughs. If more engineers had the opportunity to optimize their expertise throughout their career they could produce advanced solutions adding orders of magnitude more value. It has to do with the nature of software and how you can build an intricate system with whatever properties you want, but instead companies like to use popular frameworks and slice their product into tiny fragments that they can divide among their army of low level engineers, so of course they need a proportional amount of managers as well.