I actually wrote C-asterisk-O's and non-C-asterisk-O's, as in wildcards of CEO/COO/CTO/CFO, but HN seemed to parse my markdown and I didn't notice. Whoops. :) No military past in my background.
Yeah. That's way not me. Not really interested in playing, anyway. Would rather ensure that I work someplace that's run well so I can go home and play with a clear conscience.
You're right that more initiative will be required of me. In hindsight there were times when there was a vacuum and I could have done something (ultimately the vacuum always stayed there; noone stepped up as it would happen.) Lesson learned. Right now my company is extremely small and utterly flat (it's basically CO's and non-CO's), so there's no room to lead anything. This is really more about whatever I do next.
In the places I've worked that were large enough to actually have names and levels and whatnot, manager/non-manager was always a totally separate dimension from job level. You could easily have a level N engineer being managed by a level N-1 manager. A level N engineer becoming a manager produced a level N manager, it was not a promotion.
So I've never seen how becoming a manager means going "up."
In my mind a manager is not necessarily a leader or the leader. And certainly not a technical leader. Agreed though that a director/CTO is more of a management position, but I've seen coding CTO's, especially in the startup world.
I don't know what I want career-wise, vertically speaking, and that would be proprietary to every employer anyway. What I'm getting at is that I feel like I should be able to contribute more at this point, most simply expressed as helping the team and company make better technical decisions. How do I leverage myself better?
I'm kind of at this point where I feel like I've maxed out whatever my job title is now (NOT just speaking about my current employer - just speaking about my career in general), and feeling bored and stagnant. I don't really know where I want to go, because I'm not sure where I CAN go. I know there's a path to management which I've turned down repeatedly (I'm not interested in managing people, in having one on ones, as operating as an extension of HR in ranking employees, etc). And I see people who have made a quantum leap somehow to something well beyond a Sr. Engineer - say, Architect (kind of an out-moded term in my mind), or "Principal" which is a kind of nebulous guru-like position. Is there a third choice beyond just staying in place?
It's just really nagging me to feel like I'm not growing. I've done so many things - desktop applications, web, e-commerce, mobile, client, server, frontend, backend, enterprise, yada yada. I've run out of room to grow in that dimension, because I've been around the block and back.