I could really relate to this post, since I've recently (past couple years) gone through exactly this.

I was hired as a senior software engineer for a very early stage startup, and quickly became the de-facto engineering leader, ran multiple teams for a couple years (backend/frontend/ops), and most of the technical products of the company still have my clear fingerprints on them.

Result? After the early success, founders and VCs brought in new official managers (VPs and directors of engineering) to scale the company, and I "regressed" to an IC role. Due to all the technical context I have about the company, they essentially let me roam around without having to account or report to anyone. Essentially, I do whatever I want, whenever I want, which these days means working on very experimental stuff that selfishly interests me, but that one day might be used for the company technology (long term plan). I suspect once all the former systems are replaced they might terminate me, which I'd welcome so I'd get some severance as opposed to quitting (and I have passed several FAANG interviews so I'd find a new job relatively quickly), but it hasn't happened yet, and have been in this limbo for a couple years now.

I'm not gonna lie when I say this caused a lot of shock to me initially, along the same lines of the blog post, but I eventually dealt/coped with those feelings (sort of). I say "sort of" because I haven't changed job purely due to the financials of the situations: even if my title/role changed, my original equity grant is still vesting at the original rate, and as the company becomes more successful it's unlikely that I could find another opportunity as good as this one (from a financial point of view).

However, I am really not happy with the changes that have been implemented: in particular, the new management is really really bad, like severely technically incompetent. These people were hired as "experienced managers" from companies such as Cisco/IBM/... where they held a management position for 10+ years. These people are not technically bright or inspiring, they just live by processes and jira tickets.

This caused two very big problems:

1) The quality of these managers caused very good people, mostly individual contributors, to flee. Essentially, a lot (50%+) of my peers who were originally in the company and were extremely strong individual contributors left for greener pastures, and in informal conversations they all told me they were fed up with the level of incompetence of the new managers. They didn't have a strong equity package such as mine, so it was a very easy decision for them, I would have done exactly the same.

2) These managers are effectively unable to deal with high pressure and customers. We had customers who churned on us, explicitly listing as the main reason the inability to effectively interact with our engineering team during support escalations. A quote I remember from a customer is: "It seems like you guys lately don't know your product and what you're doing anymore".

It seems just now, two years later, the upper management is slowly realizing this, as this incompetence is starting to make a real dent into our revenues. I have seen this all along since the very first few weeks they were on board, but I always carefully refrained myself from escalating this to the founders because otherwise I would have just been seen as a "negative nancy" acting out of jealousy, so I decided to put a good face and take what's in for me (freedom in my current position).

But I truly and humbly believe that, had I been put in charge of engineering instead of those new people, I would have done a better job scaling, hiring other more talented managers and keeping ICs motivated (I value a lot technical excellence and I always go above and beyond to make sure I am technical enough in every conversation, and all the team members always appreciated that a lot when I was leading things).