Thank you for sharing. We need more information like this to be made public before engineers make more informed decisions about where to work and companies feel some pressure to value engineers as much as they do managers.
Does this article mean an engineer at the same comp level as a director or something else?
When pondering the expectations of an engineer at your organization, consider the expectations of a manager at the same level and how many engineers vs managers there are at that level in your company.
At large tech companies like Amazon (and possibly Microsoft), you'll find that managers reach higher levels significantly faster and in higher numbers, maybe because of unbalanced expectations of engineers at the same levels compared with other roles.
It's rare to see a big tech company with as many engineers as managers at the Director compensation level, for example.