This has been my experience as well. With large companies, once you have "Senior" in your title, you are officially pigeon-holed. I broke out of that by going

This has been my experience as well. With large companies, once you have "Senior" in your title, you are officially pigeon-holed. I broke out of that by going to a small company[1], but I think my varied background and career path is now blocks me from ever going back to a large one. [1] Incidentally, a non-enterprise Java shop, where I was hired despite not having written much code in Java.