I'm a developer for more than a year now. I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing at the moment, especially when I get to accomplish challenging tasks. But as a general observation, I can see that developers will remain developers for a long while. They can be promoted as Team Leaders but technically, they are still developers.
I'm quite curious if there are other tasks that could possibly be assigned to a developer aside from programming. Like, is it possible for developers to be promoted as Project Managers? The way I see it, is that being a developer is a career dead-end where you become a developer for the rest of your life and you won't get to do other things beside programming (although you can have a lot of salary increase throughout your career).
Don't get me wrong, I love programming, but when I think about my career growth, it seems like I'm stuck in the realm of programming and will not get the chance to dip my toes in other seas.
Aside from being a developer, what do you think is an exciting, career growth-boosting, challenging path for a programmer.