Comment by markus_zhang

I don't think it's wrong. I'm myself a fresh senior engineer and I'm probably going to keep that title for quite a few years.

However, the thing about working as a lead engineer (IC) is, you can pick what you want to work on. You don't have to write boilerplate code. You can still write a lot of code if you want (David Cutler said he has always been a hands-on manager who writes a lot of code). And the pay is definitely a lot better, so I think that definitely holds some weight.