Staying hands-on is pretty difficult in other industries. A good friend of mine is a research scientist. She loves what she does and is good at it and wants to go on doing it. But now she as been offered two choices, she can go for a Fellowship and spend her time writing grant proposals and mentoring students or... Well, no-one really talks about option B. And no-one who's taken option B is around the lab to ask.

Same in banking, you might be able to stay a trader, if you're good. You couldn't stay an analyst, it's up or out. Or in engineering, you don't get to actually design machinery or chips or whatever for long, again, up or out, gotta make room for the fresh intake of graduates.

This might not be the best way to work, but it's the norm, and a programmer who really can stay hands-on their whole career is fortunate indeed. My own strategy in this area is to stay hands-on but do less work directly, spend my time automating common tasks and developing tools to make junior members of my team more productive. We'll have to see how that plays out...

Most of the top people in electrical engineering at any company will be in their 50s. These aren't managers, these are very senior engineers who design from a system level.

It is hard to become a system architect without many years of experience under your belt.

At least in software, I don't think this is nearly as much a problem as in other industries.

I know a lot of very good developers who are in their 30s and 40s (not too many who are in their 50s, although I'm sure they exist and there will be more in the near future!) and have no desire to stop coding and become management. In some cases it's a very conscious lifestyle choice: you can maintain much more flexible hours and even do telework if you are writing code, while someone in a management role has to be physically present more often.

The idea that everyone should move into management is poisonous, both to developers who want to remain developers and feel pushed, and to management, which gets filled with people who don't really want to be there.

Some of the better places I've worked have recognized that some people want to get into project or staff management, and other people would prefer to perfect their craft and work independently. They link salary not to progress along a "ladder," but to actual value to the organization -- which often leads to developers who are making more than their project managers. This strikes me as totally appropriate, and it surprises me sometimes that not all companies are like this.

A company that pushes its best developers into management positions they're not thrilled about (either through 'career planning' or by making that the only way to get raises) is shooting itself in the foot in the long run.

John Dugan put it well, in a sad sort of way. http://coroutine.com/blog/3-The-Promotion-Problem

"Traditionally, programmers are offered two career paths. They can become managers (a CTO track) or senior programmers (an architect track). The problem is both tracks terminate in roles that many programmers don't want. One path leads to pure management, the other to systems design work. Where do programmers who actually want to program go?

"Elsewhere."