Career path for developers
Femur: Have you considered consulting?  By that i don't mean "charge hourly to do development" but true consulting.I worked for the technical consulting branch of one of the "Big Four" accounting firms as an Oracle DBA for a few years and found that I used my soft skills much more than my technical stuff.  Most of the projects I was brought in for where very troubled and usually had a political AND technical problem.  The usual method to solve these involved a lot of creativity to implement the best technical solution given the political climate of our clients.  It can be very rewarding solving these kinds of issues.