[greenyoda]

> As you get more senior, you should be knowledgeable and experienced enough to be able to coordinate the efforts of other engineers and mentor (or facilitate mentoring of) junior members of the team. And you should be able to cooperate (or battle) with other sections of your organization for resources and to convey progress on your projects.

I agree that those tasks are important, but none of them require being a manager who is formally someone's boss (hires, fires, does performance reviews, deals with HR issues, etc.). I didn't like being peoples' boss, so I stepped down from my management job years ago to become a developer again. But as a very senior developer, I've done all of those other things (mentoring, coordination, cooperation, etc.).