[IvyMike]

My previous company had a "technical ladder" for promotion of engineers without making them into managers.

The general idea was that as you progressed through your technical career, you would be making more and more important technical decisions, measured by the impact to the company.

A junior engineer would be making technical choices that affected one subsystem, a principal engineer might define a protocol between two large components, and an architect would be making technical decisions that affected the entire company.

You can always nitpick these things to death, but I liked the general idea.

[mathattack]

It's good that it's a real ladder. My first employer made a great show of having a dual career latter, but in reality there were very few people getting promoted on the technical side. The end of year performance reviews devolved into, "How many reports do they have?" This is ruinous. Software firms are (or at least should be) better at this.