[ipsi]

From my limited experience, Staff+ seems to have a lot of the same responsibilities as a manager, but without the direct reports—they're both “leadership” positions and focus on long(er)-term planning, business needs, cross-team communication, and enabling others rather than doing the work themselves. Though in lieu of people management, Staff+ engineers do get to spend some time coding, but it's pretty rarely the majority of their job.

So to that extent, I think there's quite a lot in common between engineering and management tracks after a certain point, both because there's a genuine need for that, and because direct code contributions just don't scale in the same way that helping others does.