It depends on if you want to continue to grow your income above inflation. As a salaried employee, to grow your income (salary - we're not talking about flippin

It depends on if you want to continue to grow your income above inflation. As a salaried employee, to grow your income (salary - we're not talking about flipping houses), you need to be 'promoted'. Promotion works by taking responsibilites beyond your current role. For a lead dev, those additional responsibilities are things like people (clients and more junior technical staff), operational (making sure that someone is there when the system falls over at 3 a.m.), and others (e.g. taking on responsibility for information security, compliance). In a small business, the biggest need is for people-project-task management. Assuming you don't want to suck it up and keep doing management you have three options: * You can choose not to be 'promoted', where you'll be happy in your job, but your salary stagnates. * You can hoose to move to a larger organisation, where you can be 'promoted' and add significant value without all the management stuff that you don't enjoy, but those jobs are in short supply and competitive. * You can keep job-hopping as a senior dev, and keep pushing your salary up with each jump.