Standard career path is about making money as neither the HR nor the techies are interested much in career. IT world is mostly flat unlike the mechanical world where heirarchies and sub heirarchies make up a career path. So a techie is at most say 4-5 levels down from a CEO. We (I m a techie) know that most of them cannot make it to director so mostly we just hang around and try to get more projects by selling our skills and retain existing clients. Once we get the urge that we do not want to much coding we move up to design/architecture or project management and repeat the same cycle. Once in a while we get the urge to earn more so we ask for promotion or switch jobs. Occassionaly we take a vacation. On maintenance project the work load is relatively lesser.
