[m3mnoch]

we do this at my (very large) company. it's awesome.

the best thing about it? engineers who aren't good at the strategic, human high-touch, or political issues, but excel at execution and implementation aren't managing teams of people -- they're busy executing and getting paid (and further promotions) based on their ability to execute, not on their ability to manage herds of programmers.

as a software engineer, i love that my boss is my boss because he's good at managing teams of software engineers. not because he's the best software engineer in the house.