> The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason.

I once worked for a large information company that had a split between technical career paths (individual contributors to architects) and managerial career paths (individual contributor to manager to directors). So I stated in my HR profile that I aspire a technical career track to make sure, and told my management.

A few months on, I was sitting on a beach in Croatia during a vacation with my now-wife when my phone rang, and my boss told me I was promoted to Director. The reasoning was that the group I was leading would be taken more seriously if it was headed by someone who was himself at Director level, the same level as the peers that I would be doing projects for/with. Thankfully my team was small enough so I could stay reasonably technical, but I still envied the folks that "were allowed to write code every day" a bit.