The promotion into management thing is commonplace in the private sector, too. I'm an awful manager, for the most part, but senior enough that I spent an inordinate amount of time dodging being put into management roles.I usually explain that I'm quite good at crisis management. Give me a soklid crisis and I'll coordinate people across teams, devise interim solutions and suchlike, and get us out of the woods and over the line. But I'm so good at it that anything that isn't a crisis I'll turn into one so I can deal with it. That usually puts them off... The Software Engineer career progression has ended up with "Staff" and similar roles which are intended to provide a seniority pathway for non-managers, which is excellent, but large portions of the landscape (including most obviously NHS, Civil Service, and of course Military) don't have anything at all comparable.