..if you love to program.
One of the great changes in the last ten years is that a good developer does not always have to move into management. In the past, the only way for a senior programmer to move up in the company was to go into a development manager or architect and spend all their time writing documents, worrying about font sizes, managing staff utilization, becoming an email monkey. This means the industry loses valuable resources. Now there is a role of Technical Lead, where a programmer steps up to help the team steer the work in the right direction, ensuring the other developers are able to work efficiently. If the project is small enough they might even get to do some hands-on coding as well.
A technical lead and a small core group of senior developers are very useful early in a project. They can spend the first few weeks developing frameworks and sorting out infrastructure and automation.
