Other options exist. My own career progression was something like * Coding * Architecting – develop system frameworks with juniors filling in the detail * Co

Other options exist. My own career progression was something like * Coding * Architecting – develop system frameworks with juniors filling in the detail * Communicating with customers to understand their needs, often by sitting with them using software we had developed * Helping the customers to write good requirements statements * Knowing enough about the domain to identify the need for a new system, as a precursor to writing the requirements * Helping the customers to develop business cases for new systems and explore costs and benefits of competing solutions * Advising the customers on how they could improve their own processes by, for example, using standards rather than suffering proprietary lock-in * Supporting customer change programmes, e.g. to change their organisation and processes to prevent creating incompatible stovepiped systems in the first place The domain here was simulation-based military training systems (typically vehicle simulators but also simulations of the wider battlespace and C4ISR systems). The progression took place over about twenty years.