Having been in the software development game for about 15 years I have seen a fair few different types of organisations. Imagine in an organisation with 20 programmers, there is only so many opportunities for promotion within the business.  For example, a few might move on to become Business Analysts, 1 or 2 may become Software Architects and other 1 or 2 might become Project Managers.

Based on this gues’timate there should be a whole generation of senior senior developers, who are happy to just do their thing and write code, but I don’t commonly see this.  Where do all the programmers go?