There's a twist to this. Once you reach the "senior" level, you don't have to "play the game" anymore. You're pretty well compensated, the requirements to get to the next level are stratospheric, so you could just stay a T5 forever. Although it'll gnaw on you that your former engineering peers who have switched to management seem to have a much easier time going up the ladder, even though they suck mightily as managers, and it's not clear to anyone (including themselves) what they actually do.
As a senior engineer at a big tech co, can agree with this. I switched teams recently and the new manager asked me what my career plans were and said “oh you think the packet you made to get a senior level is big, a staff eng needs like X number of pages and they are only N number of engs in the company”.
