[supernomad]

So regarding your point 2 I have, at the very least anecdotally, seen this happen in practice. I work in a tech startup and as such we have a lot of highly talented engineers sitting in the top spots throughout the engineering org. We have recently had the case where some of these top engineers have shifted focus and we as a company watched as the engineers beneath them rose to the occasion.

This is definitely a phenomenon that can happen, but it has a dark side that I feel is rarely accounted for. While you want to have senior talent and empower your engineers to grow, you also need to have junior/mid level engineers to support them. All to often the reason you have 20% of the employees making 80% of the effort is because they have no supporting infrastructure to help them with their jobs, or they are powerless to leverage the other employees for help without interacting with, sometimes multiple, management levels.

When we started to expand the engineering org it became readily apparent what we needed wasn't more senior talent, but more, for lack of a better word, grunts to help with the mundane tasks that the senior engineers shouldn't be working on. This same thing happens in most other organizations outside of software development as well. Essentially one way to ensure that you don't have your engineers burn out, is to ensure they have a team they can fall back on completely outside of management. I personally appreciate getting recognition from my manager and the higher ups at the company I work at. However I appreciate the team I can rely on far more. I think generally HR/Managers should get out of the way more often, and instead of directly acting make it easier for teams to help/support each other.