> Depends on the company and your priorities. Do you want to maximize income? Then make sure you work somewhere where ICs have a lot of advancement potential built into the org. Also don’t think that this track avoids politics, you still need to play the people game.
This matches what I've seen. I'd add one thing to this, too: "working in a technical role" at a lot of places actually doesn't involve a lot of hands-on feature coding at higher levels, even if you aren't a manager. You're planning the new stuff, you're doing R&D into new techs to see if the broader org should adopt them, you're mentoring, you're mediating arguments between other teams, you're talking to senior management and translating tech lingo and providing early estimates, etc.
You aren't managing people, but it's a very communication-heavy role.
If you don't do that, then yeah, I've seen people stay as just a "senior dev" level coder, but there's less salary advancement at that role.
This matches what I've seen. I'd add one thing to this, too: "working in a technical role" at a lot of places actually doesn't involve a lot of hands-on feature coding at higher levels, even if you aren't a manager. You're planning the new stuff, you're doing R&D into new techs to see if the broader org should adopt them, you're mentoring, you're mediating arguments between other teams, you're talking to senior management and translating tech lingo and providing early estimates, etc.
You aren't managing people, but it's a very communication-heavy role.
If you don't do that, then yeah, I've seen people stay as just a "senior dev" level coder, but there's less salary advancement at that role.