If you like heads down IC work, the peak is somewhere around Senior approaching Staff level. But this is not the salary peak for frontend ICs, so you will have to choose how to proceed.
From that point forward, as you progress thru your company's advanced IC track, the ranks parallel eng management ranks; and soft skills will take up more and more of your time. Eventually you're responsible for mentoring and steering an entire frontend team and you will not even get half your time to do heads down IC stuff. The rest of your time will be spent mentoring via pairing or reviews, jockeying for resources for your initiatives, interviewing, and spiking big unknown tasks. Not to implement them mind you, just to size them for someone else to implement.
The way forward then, is to practice all those not-programming things that are programming adjacent.
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If you like heads down IC work, the peak is somewhere around Senior approaching Staff level. But this is not the salary peak for frontend ICs, so you will have to choose how to proceed.
From that point forward, as you progress thru your company's advanced IC track, the ranks parallel eng management ranks; and soft skills will take up more and more of your time. Eventually you're responsible for mentoring and steering an entire frontend team and you will not even get half your time to do heads down IC stuff. The rest of your time will be spent mentoring via pairing or reviews, jockeying for resources for your initiatives, interviewing, and spiking big unknown tasks. Not to implement them mind you, just to size them for someone else to implement.
The way forward then, is to practice all those not-programming things that are programming adjacent.