[United857]

Once you get past a certain point in your engineering career, in order to grow more you'll need to take on more responsibility than one person can reasonably do. Then it's more about leading and influencing others and getting them to jump onboard, even if you're an individual contributor.

[nitely]

Assuming you care about taking on more responsibility. That's not the path for everyone, though. I'm fine being just a very experienced programmer. I couldn't care less about "leading".