People who are really good at things generally thrive on challenge, because without that you don't persist long enough to get good. For many, me included, no reasonable amount of money will get them through doing years of something where they aren't growing.

1. Salary will plateau eventually. I know early in your career it doesn't seem like it will, but trust me: It will. I don't care what company you are in, or how good you are, "Fourth Senior Software Engineer From The Left" is never going to be making $1M/yr. (Not that that should necessarily be your goal, but it illustrates that you will plateau at some point.)

2. When you keep job hopping for more money but no change in level, you risk gaining "1 year of experience 20 times" instead of 20 years of experience. You're sacrificing long term career growth for short term salary bumps. I did this for years and ended up shooting myself in the foot long-term. My college friends, who instead played the Title / Ladder Climbing game, are all much better off than I now. They're all job-secure VPs, SVPs, and CxO's in their companies vs. me who still doesn't even have any direct reports, and is one of many interchangeable worker bees.

No more doing that for me. I'll only accept, at a minimum, a level jump at this point.

Or to you, is "management" simply the next level beyond individual contributorship? I won't work for an employer that doesn't plan for career advancement in BOTH tracks - management is great, but for every one of you who sees career advancement as managing others, there's someone like me who wants to stay the hell away from that while still finding room to advance my career as an individual contributor.

Any thoughts?

I love the concept of having VP-level IC “wizard” roles who don’t have to manage, but have never seen it in practice.

Generally, there's wayyy less of the IC roles, which essentially means that people who want advancement are often gonna end up on the management track.

As a Staff Engineer I'm just a really engineering focused manager "lite" if you will, (in so many ways, maybe I'm not doing enough justice here, but its how it feels day to day).

I like it, because I'm managing the architecture side of things and still involved in engineering decisions I care about, but I have both direct people working with me that I'm accountable for, as well as a 2nd level of accountability for the entire organization. I still get to commit code and do exploratory research, which is nice, but its not the highest percentage of work I do. So much of it is overseeing the implementation details of other engineers, providing guidance to both engineering as an org, or individual engineers, or being involved in product roadmap so that our architecture evolves flexibly enough to meet where we want to go, writing documentation and diagrams, giving technical presentations etc.

All told, at some point, you have to be a manager, even if its not a direct "manager" role, per se.

I've been doing "It" (shipping software -which is quite different from "writing" software) for my entire adult life.

Basically, if you want to actually ship a superb-Quality native iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS/MacOS app, in an astonishingly short period of time, I'm a good person to talk to.

What I have learned, is that very few people seem to want to actually ship software. Instead, companies become obsessed with "coding culture," and "process" (which can mean many different things). As it comes time to start preparing for it to go out the door, all kinds of roadblocks start piling up. It's crazy.

I was "frozen out" of the industry, because of my age, which really pissed me off, but that has turned out to be a great thing. It's been a real joy, writing my own stuff. Out of necessity, I have to keep the scope humble, but that's fine.

Many companies must build out rigorous standards, and checks and balances in order to deal with regression to the mean.

If what you're saying is true you're multiple standard deviations above the normal engineer, and scaling you is non-trivial. Bob martin has said the population of coders doubles every 5 yrs meaning at any given time 1/2 of the engineers have less than 5 years experience. When you need something that would take 1000 of you, which might not even exist on the planet, they instead have to build a system that takes 10k of those 5yr and less engineers -- and have the highest quality outliers leveraged though standards, automation, building engineering culture etc.

I get that a lot. It's absurdly easy to verify (I point to all my work), but folks would rather sling mud, than take a peek.

Doesn't matter. I'm not looking for work anymore.

In my time, I have worked with many people that make me look like a piker. I suspect they get chased out, too.

It really doesn't matter to me if it's true about you or not, we can still discuss the issue of designing for talent several standard deviations above the mean vs one that falls within, say, [0-1] std deviation above the mean.

And I feel you on process. I got involved in process because I wanted to quickly solve user problems, and then keep on solving user problems. But so much of the process-industrial complex is not focused on that. E.g., the SAFe® process is the effective opposite of what early Agile pioneers were aiming at. Its major function is to give managers and executives a sense of control almost without regard to how achievable that is or what it costs in terms of productivity and lost opportunity.

In perticular, you're not working in the same semantic framework as GP, who was talking about "It+1", "It+2" and so on

It has been my experience that actually delivering, working, high-Quality, supported, documented software (regardless of what the software does), within a reasonable period of time, is beyond the capabilities of many corporations.

I suspect that some folks make money by convincing others to invest, then hightailing it, before the chickens come home to roost, as opposed to actually selling a finished and supported product to end-users. In that case, looking like a "shipper," is much more important than actually being one.

But that's just one "It" on the continuum. It could also be grant-writing, selling, managing, singing, shredding guitar, racing minibikes, whatever.

In any given case, there's always some threshold of what an "effective It" is. It may not be a clear-cut line. For example, research is very "fuzzy," and a researcher that can do "It," may be excellent at failure, because their job is to poke holes in theories.

In fact, if the company is all about getting A-round funding, then folding up the card tables, and moving on, someone that "looks like a shipper" could be an effective "It."