When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.
I don't know what WAI means, but note that I said discovered above. There's a separate conversation to get that work funded and that's where the managers come into the picture. Managers don't discover the work - they decide whether to fund the work.
I disagree. Have you never seen a manager hired from another place already come in with a bucket list they want to do bc “that’s how we done it at X”? That’s a classic. There are less nefarious examples of this ofc but ime managers absolutely do and even want to discover the work. Now whether they’re the right people to do it is entirely different question =)
