It's a good question, and a difficult one for me to answer as I'm still trying to figure it out.
One possible defense against this is to regularly refresh talent, and encourage high performing individuals to swap between contributor and manager roles without any career penalties in between stints.
Even if it doesn't work out for a contributor to manage people or a manager to write code, the cross pollination of talent could strengthen the technical capabilities across the organization. Contributors and managers would build trust with each other, and ultimately empathize enough with each other to act as trusted partners.
I've seen this play out in the startup ecosystem as you see VPEs leave to become early stage startup CTOs, get their hands dirty to launch ideas, and then ultimately bring in trusted contributors once the products have found product-market fit.
One possible defense against this is to regularly refresh talent, and encourage high performing individuals to swap between contributor and manager roles without any career penalties in between stints.
Even if it doesn't work out for a contributor to manage people or a manager to write code, the cross pollination of talent could strengthen the technical capabilities across the organization. Contributors and managers would build trust with each other, and ultimately empathize enough with each other to act as trusted partners.
I've seen this play out in the startup ecosystem as you see VPEs leave to become early stage startup CTOs, get their hands dirty to launch ideas, and then ultimately bring in trusted contributors once the products have found product-market fit.