Came across this great little cartoon in a Minitab blog post; the blog post itself didn’t really catch my fancy, however I loved the little cartoon that came with the post. In my experience large technology companies (which often can have a lot of engineers and scientists working for them) often offer two different career paths for the technologists — the first is the traditional management stream where you move away from doing the technology work to managing others; the second stream is often called something like the “individual contributor” stream where you can continue to get promotions and pay raises somewhat equivalent to what you might get in the management stream, however you get to continue to do hands-on technical work and possibly provide mentoring and coaching to new technical employees….. that’s the context for the following cartoon. Enjoy!