They're still going to have upwards of 5 levels in their hierarchy, so this is obviously for the plebs who are front-line managers, not the several layers above them, as (for example) I'm not sure what a strong player-coach VP of Engineering would exactly look like. I got to Director and quit because it was impossible to be a true contributor at that level or higher. You can see this when you're in critical mode like downtime or a breach; senior management is useless.