I spent the first half of my career at HP/HPE on the management track, and the second half in various business unit chief technologist’s offices on the technical ladder.
The roles do exist, and by definition they make comparable contributions to the business to the equivalent rung on the management ladder. At the Director level and up, there are fewer technical ladder roles than there are manager roles…and precious few of either.
An HP colleague of decades, now an HPE Fellow, is really good at coaching/mentoring engineers who are aiming for higher rungs on the technical ladder. One of the first things he does is describe how the work is qualitatively different from a mainstream engineering role, and gets more different at each rung. A lot of people look at that and say, “that doesn’t sound like fun” or “I don’t want to do those things”. There’s nothing wrong with staying in a role “just” writing code or designing hardware.
