&quot;Choosing&quot; is the keyword tricky phrase here.<p>At my last job interview, the &quot;what do you plan on doing 5 years from now?&quot; question came up.  After talking up things that interested me that could fill 5 years of time, he asked me about management aspirations.  I confessed that I had no personal interest.<p>He followed with something about how he wished it was &quot;realistic&quot; for himself to stay in non-managerial roles.  Apparently, there are a lot of programmers out there that feel some kind of pressure to move into management at some point if they want to stay in the I.T. game.