If there is anything I've learned over having a "successful" career as an employed person its that it eventually comes to a point where the benefits of moving forward/up in my opinion outweigh the benefits. (and in my experience this happens pretty quick in tech)
You get to a point where you increasingly can take on responsibility but the relative upside is no longer commensurate with the increasing value you are adding to the company. On top of it you inevitably start to become at odds with your employer in that as your abilities expand you wonder why you work for the person above you.
I guess from my perspective, its become apparent to me that moving up is generally a fools game at a certain point while "moving out" is the real version of moving up. I'm not going to say that taking that step of being independent is easy in that I'm still working on it myself but its hard for me to get excited about that next promotion these days no matter what perks it comes with.
Here, here. Watch this problem explode among traditionally non-tech professions.
Increasingly, you see super smart late-20s–early-30s professionals, with five or six years of solid domain-expertise, teaching themselves to code. They start using their programming knowledge to solve big problems and generally kick ass. Sounds great, right?
The problem: it's much better politics for the leadership to stuff these forward-thinkers into the lower castes, take credit for all their awesome work, and poach all their wisdom by proxy. Few entrenched managers will admit that "the help" has become the master. Moving out is the only way for these new hybrid-pros to move up.
Domain experience is VERY valuable in some fields. For some years, I've believed that hybrid degrees or education are the way forward for CS/programming.
Maybe someday we'll see accountants, medical doctors, civil engineers, researchers from all over science with a double major or mixed major (I think those are the correct US terms).
Also, a double degree with business knowledge as well (more general), kind of what programmers turn MBAs do, or the various Management of Technology degrees.
This is exactly was MIS--or Management Information Systems--is: a hybrid major between CS and some sort of Business focus.
Up until the dot-com boom of the late-'90s, this was the preferred degree for many corporate IT departments. In fact, the CFO was head of IT/MIS in many companies up until the mid-/late-90s.
Other hybrids are bioinformatics and cognitive science/computing.
I think a big part of the problem is that, when a company becomes political or factionalized (and many companies do) external leadership becomes the more "lightweight" option. An internal promote, in a politicized environment, can be taken as a statement about which faction is favored and the future of the company. An external promotion is an unknown, so people are more likely to see what they want to see in the change and, at least in the short term, less likely to be pissed off.
However, I think external sourcing for leadership positions is more politically risky in the long-term. First, people can get a sense that it's impossible to move up. Second, the new CTO or VP/Eng is going to bring other people in with whom he has pre-existing relationships, those people will be regarded as presumptive favorites... and then the transplants along with those they invite into their clique become the new faction. You can't solve a factionalism problem with external promotions; it tends to create new ones.
You get to a point where you increasingly can take on responsibility but the relative upside is no longer commensurate with the increasing value you are adding to the company. On top of it you inevitably start to become at odds with your employer in that as your abilities expand you wonder why you work for the person above you.
I guess from my perspective, its become apparent to me that moving up is generally a fools game at a certain point while "moving out" is the real version of moving up. I'm not going to say that taking that step of being independent is easy in that I'm still working on it myself but its hard for me to get excited about that next promotion these days no matter what perks it comes with.