How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually? I go back and forth on if I want to pursue an MBA every couple years or so (though I doubt the education would be worth it, it'd be a stamp on my resume for wanting to go that direction).

Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.

And even harder to measure the production of executives, yet they don't seem to have any trouble pulling in the big paychecks.

You're worth any amount of money that both you and your employer agree on.

> Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually?

I doubt it. The idea of not wanting to manage people gets more noise because 'moving into management' seems to be default path, and in some organizations if you don't move in that direction, you are punished. So people complain more loudly about these issues.

This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you had no manager and had no assigned work but people from other projects could come to them for advice, help, consultation, etc. and they could choose what they wanted to work on.

Often the Jedi Masters were tapped to teach intro engineering course to new engineers on the specifics of the type of projects this company worked on, so this was a quasi-academic and quasi-consulting gig for the best of the best engineers.

As a fairly new engineer, I got assigned to a new group and invited to a meeting that could impact the system I was working on. I show up and it is a meeting with an engineering partner (outside company) that was contesting some calcs regarding the pipe strength and mounting requirements for an installation (multi-billion dollar project). Their engineering team was insisting on assumptions that would have quadrupled the cost of a system that our group was responsible for, not to mention weeks or months of delays to recalc and redesign the system. Unbeknownst to me, this dispute had been at logger heads for months with no resolution.

One of the Jedi's, let's just call him Fred, taught me years before in the intro courses and I had remained in contact with him over time. Based on the courses Fred taught I thought he might have the expertise and interest in this area to take a look at this problem so I met with him and gave him the technical details. He agreed to attend the next meeting and advise but he made me do all the calcs, presentation and etc. for the next meeting but all under his guidance. So I go through my PPT presentation and at the end the other company's engineers have all sorts of objections, disagreements, etc. So our Jedi steps in and starts fielding questions and asks them to justify their position. It turns out that their reference text they were using to justify their position was actually written by Fred! I can still hear the other engineer say, "you mean you are Fred XYZ that wrote book ABC" with awe and respect in his voice. It turns out they were missing some important exceptions and qualifications later in the book that Fred cited and the meeting and conflict was resolved.

So the moral of the story is to always have a Jedi in your corner? No.

The moral of the story is that engineers and problem solvers (and I assume coders) have different motivation than the "success" of big, showy career managing a lot of people. We (technical people) love to solve problems and management is projecting their values onto technical people when they offer them management positions as "promotions".