Yes, well, at some point you get tired of seeing people make the same mistakes over and over. Those people might be senior engineers tasked with architectural

Yes, well, at some point you get tired of seeing people make the same mistakes over and over. Those people might be senior engineers tasked with architectural design for the first time. Those people might be management with their heads up their....um, with misguided ideas. So the Senior Staff position may involve less day-to-day coding/design, but a lot more heading off disaster, which I would argue adds huge value to the company, and personally I find satisfying. In fact, there is nothing less satisfying than failing to head off a disaster that you could see coming from miles away. I remember a very senior IC at one company I worked at, named Gary. Gary basically wandered from meeting-to-meeting, only attending a few minutes because his calendar was routinely triple-booked. He would listen to a few minutes of argumentation, ask the one question that would slice the problem open like a sharp machete to a coconut, and then move on to the next meeting. Didn't design much any more, but his contributions had huge leverage. Don't write off that some day you may want to be a Gary. It may come naturally at some point, when you frequently start thinking: "I've seen this movie before and it has a baaaad ending."