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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.

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    Your premise doesn't match reality, as evidenced by this question which asks the exact opposite. That question was again a duplicate of this question. While this can't be called a duplicate, I'm voting to close as too broad because your essential question is "how do I land a management role?". – Lilienthal♦ Jul 30 '15 at 12:22
  • If you're a developer, why on earth would you want to become a project manager? – Jim G. Jul 30 '15 at 15:34
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is that being a developer is a career dead-end where you become a developer for the rest of your life

this is your false assumption.

I am a software developer in Pakistan for the past 2 years. I am still a developer though. But I have seen my project managers that they have been in development role for 3-6 years and then they become Project Managers.

I had my CEO in my first company, I once asked him and he told that he was a developer for 4 years, then he became PM and then he started his own setup, he is the CEO now.

So you can be a developer to have extensive experience in pro industry and go into management level, and then you can build your own setup to start a company

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In looking at developer careers, you need to understand that different people make different choices. I am sure many of the people you see as being "stuck" have chosen that path in preference to e.g. management.

I was offered a management job at an appropriate stage in my career, when I could have become a low level manager without taking a pay cut. I declined it. My view was that I had already found something I was good at and enjoyed doing for which my employers were willing to pay extremely well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I did switch later on from programming to computer hardware architecture, but that used much the same skills and thinking.

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