Sounds like you might want to strongly consider switching to another company. Growth is pretty important, and it sounds like you are bumping your head on the ceiling.

Last year I tried being a team lead (as a kind of promotion) but I didn’t really feel the same kind of satisfaction of writing code and solving hard problems. After eight months my manager and I agreed to put me back on my old position, full time developer. The sad thing is, my company has fixed rules about salaries for a job position (local govenment) and I am at my top. Making more money means switching to an unwanted position or to another company. A hard decision.

I’m going through this right now. Trying to figure out how to take on more responsibility, but still stay close to code. The company I work for wants to promote me and is asking what I’d like to do (which is actually great of them – better than some companies with the rigid career plan). So I’m trying to figure out what would be additional responsibility while still staying nose deep in coding.

As a more general rule though, it always seemed backwards to me that a lot of companies will promote their best developers to management. You have someone that is great at writing code and you basically yank them away from doing that and make them manage people which requires a totally different skill set. I always wonder if there’s a way to fix that anomaly.