I think 'peers' is a good viewpoint. I used to think of it differently though. Imagine if you didn't have managers, so you had to spend all day answering the

I think 'peers' is a good viewpoint. I used to think of it differently though. Imagine if you didn't have managers, so you had to spend all day answering the phone and emails, sitting in boring meetings, getting interrupted to deal with people problems, making out TPS reports. You'd want to hire an assistant or secretary to do all that stuff for you so you could get some work done, right? Developers have that, we just call them manager or boss and they get the slot above us in the org chart. That's not an insult, just a view of how things are different in development vs. traditional industry. A good manager is very valuable, and a lot of 'doers' wouldn't want that job even with the higher rank/status.