And finding that place also means you will never be anything more than that. Thats what always strikes me about these complaints about having to do a little extra, or stuff thats not directly in your job description etc. And then complain about how your manager sucks because you are not valued or promoted fast enough.

Trust me, most engineers are not THAT good that their code writing contributions alone would justify high career leaps. Even the highly technical leaders need to do a lot of brain work thats not necessarily coding - like architecture design and whatnot, and most of that requires a lot of interaction, discussions and other soft skills.