Is there no financial growth, unless someone promoted to be a people manager or sales person in IT services?

Promotion vs Salary growth - unless one gets promoted in IT services companies their salary won't beat inflation.

One of management person who barely understand technology, gave following gyan in a company meeting:

• Now there is no vertical skill acquisition, horizontal skill acquisition, but there is comb model aka. learn as many things as possible, your resume should look like a comb.

• To get promoted, you have to learn sales skills. If you cannot sell yourself, you can never sell to customer.

• You won't get hikes unless you upskill randomly and it should look like a comb teeth.

To me it looks like the management of this IT company lost their way.

If every employee aims to be sales person, then where they will get developers?

Why to beat inflation with salary hike a person need to get promotion? The salary hike is needed to match inflation. (well, company making profits more than inflation and happy to give dividends)

Looks like large IT services companies are missing the point. Their main revenue is generated by selling hours software engineers. These cumulative hours is their product.

By forcing the smart engineers to become sales people, they reducing their product quality.

I don't know if this is arrogance or ignorance on part of these management people.

Most of these management people are great at business and people management skills, but lack the understanding of technology in depth. That is why they are given those roles.

But looks like the inherent bias, "what I do is the root cause of world's existence" feeling they have is plainly wrong, and it is causing lot of harm by reducing the quality of the product they sell.