I read an interesting article about Engineering Culture at Shutterstock and the illustration of IC vs Management Career Tracks made me think about how inconsistent it is across the industry.
I've found Levels.fyi to be helpful at shedding some light on the parity of these levels across organizations.
I am curious about what the career track looks like at your job.
Promoting developers to managers has been one of the biggest flaws in our industry!
I'm an independent consultant; so I get to decide what the career tracks are! That might sound super great; but remember, that it also means the track can go down as well as up (if I don't keep up with getting new clients, and expanding my knowledge on my own).
My company has a career track similar to that picture. There's a track for test/qa engineers, software engineers, and engineering managers.
Test/software eng starts with a junior/mid/senior role, at which point it forks between management and technical roles.
Management track
Individual contributor track
Being part of a small organisation there isn't really a career track. I used to work for a large company and than basically all developers would need to become managers. I like the freedom I have now, and if there is some course or certificate I want to go for its negotiable. I would probably get pretty unhappy of not at least half my time was spend programming.