If you want to afford a nice house in a good neighborhood with good schools in the Bay Area, you’ve got to go into management.
What you might be trying to say is there are more available positions at VP than DE, so your chances of making it are better? Or that being promoted to VP is easier than to DE? I think having seen how the sausage is made, would agree with both of those.
Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs?
How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field.
How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager.
At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many.
That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time.
The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder.
It's not. Not even close.
Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs.
That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.