glue
Tanya Reilly has an excellent talk (and transcribed slides) called Being Glue that perfectly captures this effect. In her words: "Glue work is expected when you're senior... and risky when you're not."
What she calls glue work, I'm going to call systems design. They're two sides of the same issue. Humans are the most unruly systems of all, and yet, amazingly, they follow many of the same patterns as other systems.
People who are naturally excellent at glue work often stall out early in the prescribed engineering pipeline, even when they'd be great in later stages (staff engineers, directors, and executives) that traditional engineers struggle at. In fact, it's well documented that an executive in a tech company requires almost a totally different skill set than a programmer, and rising through the ranks doesn't prepare you for that job at all. Many big tech companies hire executives from outside the company, and sometimes even from outside their own industry, for that reason.
- Apenwarr, Systems design explains the world: volume 1