we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss

I wouldn't actually say that, but I would say that the TLM role works at a very specific stage in a company's lifecycle, and many companies that use it (including Google itself from around 2010 onwards) have long since past that point. IMHO, the conditions where a TLM role is appropriate are: 1.) You need to be in the company growth phase where you are still trying to capture share of a competitive market, i.e. it matters that you can execute quickly and correctly. 2.) There needs to be significant ambiguity in the technical projects you take on. TLMs should be determining software architecture, not fitting their teams' work into an existing architecture. 3.) No more than 3 levels of management between engineer and person who has ultimate responsibility for business goals, and no more than 6 reports per manager. The mathematically inclined will note that this caps org size at 6^3 = 216, …

This kinda brings up a question I've often thought about. Why is it that we structure growth in a company to be so biased towards moving into management roles? I mean there is the obvious part of the answer in that managers are the ones that are given the power to define that growth ladder, but I'm not sure this fully explains things. If people are transferring from technical positions to managerial positions then should they also not be aware that there is a lot of advantages to allowing people to keep climbing the ladder through technical positions? That institutional knowledge can be incredibly valuable. It's often what leads to those people being such wizards. They've been with the code for so long that they know where things will fail and what are the best parts to jump in to make modifications (and where not to!). But every time you transfer one of these people to a non-technical r…