[codegeek]

You need to think about the following to really define what you are looking for:

- What percentage of time do you want to spend coding vs doing other things like helping/guiding other devs, project management etc. 80 20 ? 60 40 ?

- Are you willing to come in to a team/company and use what they have versus redoing everything ? Do you have a preference for language/stack ? If there is a team that does PHP, would you be interested or only want to work in <latest_hottest_language> ?

- How do you expect to grow further as an Individual Contributor ? What could you do to make yourself more valuable to the company/team every 12 months ? I ask because you want to grow further and you have to define what that is exactly. One of the reasons senior devs start managing because that is easier to measure in terms of growth and impact. If you are a great developer, how can you keep justifying growth (salary etc) every year ? What should be metrics for it ?