There is no career path for programmers. Once you are a programmer, that's the end of your career. You climb the ladder by starting to manage people. But you don't become a super-programmer.
This is very much false. Many companies explicitly have a career path for individual contributors, even. Managers can jump higher, sure, but there's still a world of difference between a junior and a principal; and then there's technical fellows.
I work in a company that has principals and fellows. Here's what you are missing:
* Overwhelming majority of programming companies don't have anything like that.
* Overwhelming majority of programmers, even if they work in a company who has that will never become principals or fellows simply because there's no official process of becoming one. It's usually a gift from your management. You don't take a test, nobody's going to count your commits or measure your programming output in any other way and say "whoa, this guy now qualifies for this title!"
* You are confused between being good at what you do and a title HR puts on your paycheck. To make you understand this better: say, if you are a surgeon, then bettering yourself as a surgeon is very likely to make you more valuable in the eyes of your employer, and, subsequently, put more money into your bank account. If you better yourself as a programmer, in most likelihood you will end up disappointed you wasted all this time for nothing. You will have problems getting a job, since often you'll be overqualified for what's on the offer. On top of this, a title you earned with one employer doesn't translate into an equivalent title at a different employer. Employers use these "principal" or "fellow" titles to justify paying you a bit more, so that they don't have to deal with hiring a replacement for you. If you switch jobs, the new employer has no incentive to hire you at the same level of "pretend seniority".
In other words you are confused between added pay that you accumulate as long as you keep working for the same employer, no matter the quality of your output, with the pay you get for being good at what you do. Usually, in many professions, people become better the longer they spend in their field. In programming this is less so.
Haha, good one. Well, I'm not saying there's no difference between programmers in terms of how well they can do their job. All I'm saying is the difference isn't reflected in the paycheck.
If you are a good programmer (ok, a 10x one!), then, eventually, one of these will happen to you:
* Despair. You come to despise the peers, the tools you have to work with, the market that will never acknowledge nor learn how to utilize your skills... and you become a vertical farmer, or an Irish pub owner, or a part-time elementary school PA teacher. (All of those I've witnessed firsthand.)
* Like I mentioned before, you become a manager. Or maybe go back to academia and become a professor. You still program, sort of, but mostly on a whiteboard.
* The technology you dedicated your life efforts to dies. And then you find yourself in an unfamiliar although related field where your past successes and fame aren't acknowledged. You feel too tired to prove yourself once again and succumb to a boring and meaningless desk job. Perhaps you become a better home cook, or a better parent.
* Start your own company. Very few do this. Most of those who do fail, and then loop back to the of the first three. Otherwise, you are promoted into the owners class. I don't know what happens there, it's happening behind closed doors, at least I was never invited.
