And to add, this rarely indicates anything about the depth and/or breadth of the 'used to' experience.
A lot of the strongest individual contributors I see want to stay in that track and use that experience to make positive and sensible change, while the ones that move into the management tracks don't always have such motivations. There's no gatekeeping intended here, just an observation that the ones that are intrinsically motivated by the detailed technical work naturally build that knowledge base through time spent hands-on in those areas and are best able to make more impactful systemic decisions.
People in senior tech leadership also are not often exposed to the direct results of their decisions too (if they even stay in the company for long enough to see the outcome of longer-term decisions, which itself is rare).
While it's not impossible to find the folk that do have breadth of experience and depth of knowledge but are comfortable and want to be in higher-level decision making places, it's frustratingly rare. And in a lot of cases, the really good ones that speak truth to power end up in situations where 'Their last day was yesterday, we wish them all the best in their future career endeavours.' It's hardly surprising that it's a game that the most capable technical folks just don't want to play, even if they're the ones that should be playing it.
This all could just be anecdata from a dysfunctional org, of course...
And to add, this rarely indicates anything about the depth and/or breadth of the 'used to' experience.
A lot of the strongest individual contributors I see want to stay in that track and use that experience to make positive and sensible change, while the ones that move into the management tracks don't always have such motivations. There's no gatekeeping intended here, just an observation that the ones that are intrinsically motivated by the detailed technical work naturally build that knowledge base through time spent hands-on in those areas and are best able to make more impactful systemic decisions.
People in senior tech leadership also are not often exposed to the direct results of their decisions too (if they even stay in the company for long enough to see the outcome of longer-term decisions, which itself is rare).
While it's not impossible to find the folk that do have breadth of experience and depth of knowledge but are comfortable and want to be in higher-level decision making places, it's frustratingly rare. And in a lot of cases, the really good ones that speak truth to power end up in situations where 'Their last day was yesterday, we wish them all the best in their future career endeavours.' It's hardly surprising that it's a game that the most capable technical folks just don't want to play, even if they're the ones that should be playing it.
This all could just be anecdata from a dysfunctional org, of course...