If you look at salary surveys you'll find that management positions top out at a higher pay grade than coding jobs. For example the role 'CEO' can pay 7 figures annually, there is no 'technical' job (even CTO) that pay on that scale.
Generally I object to the question, lets break it down:
"higher paid technical job" - "not get to code" those are the active elements in the question. If all you want to do is write code all day and night, then the amount of money you will be paid to do that will top out these days just under $150,000 in the US. Understand though that pay for technical work is a distribution, some folks will get more than that, but the further 'right' of that number, the smaller the pool of people who can get that kind of money. So the general answer for the exemplar technical person, is about $150K max, individual salaries will vary. And that doesn't include 'bonus' programs.
Management jobs top out around $250K. Again, same constraints, some get more but the further right of that number you go the fewer and fewer the people.
If you want to code all day and make a lot of money your only choice is to leverage your programming. Which is to say you work for a combination of cash and equity in the company you are working for. I made more money off the Sun stock I got as stock options and through the employee purchase plan than I made as salary. It doesn't always work out that way, but unlike salary, equity doesn't have a 'limit' on its growth value. I personally know a number of millionaires, many of them who predominantly wrote code throughout their career, but none of them became millionaires because of salary.
My concern is that if you're counting on 'writing code' to make you rich, you're in for a disappointment. If the code you write is making the company you're with more valuable, and you can share in that value, then you're coding is making you rich in proportion to your equity ownership.
Generally I object to the question, lets break it down:
"higher paid technical job" - "not get to code" those are the active elements in the question. If all you want to do is write code all day and night, then the amount of money you will be paid to do that will top out these days just under $150,000 in the US. Understand though that pay for technical work is a distribution, some folks will get more than that, but the further 'right' of that number, the smaller the pool of people who can get that kind of money. So the general answer for the exemplar technical person, is about $150K max, individual salaries will vary. And that doesn't include 'bonus' programs.
Management jobs top out around $250K. Again, same constraints, some get more but the further right of that number you go the fewer and fewer the people.
If you want to code all day and make a lot of money your only choice is to leverage your programming. Which is to say you work for a combination of cash and equity in the company you are working for. I made more money off the Sun stock I got as stock options and through the employee purchase plan than I made as salary. It doesn't always work out that way, but unlike salary, equity doesn't have a 'limit' on its growth value. I personally know a number of millionaires, many of them who predominantly wrote code throughout their career, but none of them became millionaires because of salary.
My concern is that if you're counting on 'writing code' to make you rich, you're in for a disappointment. If the code you write is making the company you're with more valuable, and you can share in that value, then you're coding is making you rich in proportion to your equity ownership.