Technical leaders do exist and mentoring is a huge part of it, you need to figure out a way to be a multiplier, without being a manager. If you want more money

Technical leaders do exist and mentoring is a huge part of it, you need to figure out a way to be a multiplier, without being a manager. If you want more money, you need to have more impact, but there are so many hours in a day, so you need to delegate, help others grow and look for large scale patterns that are easier to see with experience. If you do code, you must choose wisely what's the best use of your time, sometimes you do what nobody else dares to (take calculated risks), small interventions to teach and speed up a project, or just plain do what needs to be done (even if it's boring as fuck) to let others grow and add value. You also need to develop a good working relationship with other leaders (technical and otherwise). It's imperative that they trust you, so your integrity must be beyond reproach. Understand their goals and objectives and help get the company to a better place. In many cases, leading is a lot about emotions, people get scared/nervous when facing uncertain situations (think production incidents, external threats, etc.), it's in these situations that you need to be a reassuring presence, using your technical skills to break down a problem and give clear steps and criteria to attack whatever issue is at hand. Be calm and focus on the objective reality as much as possible. Give clear instructions and lean on more managerial roles to help track down tasks and deal with minutia. In all, I think a technical career starts with focus on the technical stuff, the science and technology, but as the problems become larger and more challenging, you need to start to pay attention to the people side of it, software is a team sport after all.