Very few companies have a legitimate “parallel but equal” tech track for IC’s that remains IC all the way up. At some point on the totem pole you end up managing. All roads upward point to it. I currently work for a company that has a robust stack of levels for software engineers, but nobody at the “director equivalent” tech level is an actual IC.

I love the concept of having VP-level IC “wizard” roles who don’t have to manage, but have never seen it in practice.

I've seen those roles at Microsoft, Amazon, and other big tech companies.. Like you implied, though, they all plateau in compensation around $800k or so.

These roles definitely exist, but it's worth counting the relative numbers at each level for Manager/Senior Manager/Director/VP vs IC's at that level.

Generally, there's wayyy less of the IC roles, which essentially means that people who want advancement are often gonna end up on the management track.

At my most recent company engineering managers made less than the engineers they managed and staff engineers usually made more than directors. So if you wanted to go the management track for advancement it meant a pay cut for at least a few years.

I can't speak for the direct OP, however outside of exceedingly large companies, rarely do you get to just be a major contributor and still climb past a certain point. Microsoft and Google have things like distinguished engineers but most people never reach these levels, because you have to be truly outstanding to attain them, and often, they too are really good at managing their sphere of influence.

As a Staff Engineer I'm just a really engineering focused manager "lite" if you will, (in so many ways, maybe I'm not doing enough justice here, but its how it feels day to day).

I like it, because I'm managing the architecture side of things and still involved in engineering decisions I care about, but I have both direct people working with me that I'm accountable for, as well as a 2nd level of accountability for the entire organization. I still get to commit code and do exploratory research, which is nice, but its not the highest percentage of work I do. So much of it is overseeing the implementation details of other engineers, providing guidance to both engineering as an org, or individual engineers, or being involved in product roadmap so that our architecture evolves flexibly enough to meet where we want to go, writing documentation and diagrams, giving technical presentations etc.

All told, at some point, you have to be a manager, even if its not a direct "manager" role, per se.

You hit it pretty spot on. There's still a lot of management expected at those levels, it's just of an influential type instead of an authoritative type. Which is often even harder to wield effectively. You're still expected to go out and force-multiply, because the bottom line is a single person worth of productivity can only go so far.

Yes, much harder without authority over a budget and staff.