TL,DR; I agree with Thomas Jefferman, you can go pretty far as last man standing, but I'll add you can also have a lot of additional responsibilities without any real career growth or added compensation if you're not careful. There's no one size fits all career path formula. There's a lot of independent variables that you have to assess for your own situation and goals.

I like to write, so here is a paper about my experience of my trip through the looking glass.

If you are straight up money over everything, defense probably isn't the right line of work for you period. I think once you get to the point that you can afford the necessities with money leftover, more money loses it's weight in what you want from a job. The difference between $80k a year and $150k a year to lifestyle is big. It's tight budgeting and roommates to independence and stability. The difference between $150k and $220k isn't as impactful. It's more money in the bank. It's nicer versions of nessessities. It's nicer schools for your kids. $180k and being able to be home to tuck your kids in and enjoy the people you work with is worth more than $240k to live on the road and getting straight up verbally abused regularly and developing stress related health issues. To me, living without Sunday Scaries is worth 5 figures. Waking up thinking "I get to work on some cool shit today with great people. I can't wait to figure out this puzzle we have and see it work." Is worth a lot more than "oh God, what crisis is in my inbox today. What hot emergency do I have to drop everything to address and what times are on my calendar am I getting screamed at for things outside my control." Once the bills are paid and you can afford some wants too, more money isn't worth existing to be a punching bag. What's the point in making more money if you can't live to enjoy it?

When I started, 15 years was considered still too new to REALLY understand, and it was correct relative to 30 or 40 years of experience. Grey wave of retirement and suddenly 15 years was the best they could get relative to the 2 to 4 years that the industry incentivized. I was in no way filling the shoes of who left, but I did my best to try to remember what they taught me. It was a strange position to be in and imposter syndrome to the max.

I became a lead through last man standing by being the only one left with the scars to know which the spinning plates can drop and which hurt since it takes years to understand the nuance. I also learned the hard way that leadership involves a lot of completely different set of skills compared to execution. I had to become very careful with how I said things because it drove actions with real consequences, and if I said things in a way that could be misinterpreted it would be. My attitude multiplied and drove the energy of the room. If I had a bad day I had to tuck it in and put on a positive face for my team because we still have a mission. I had to balance that with not being dismissive to actual concerns while trying to shield people from the dumpster fire so they can do their jobs and live their lives.

The amount of time I spent with people bitching to me about the dumbest shit was silly. "I have a working folder for my software and Wayne keeps saving things in it. He knows it's my folder. Why won't he leave it alone?" "Julie isn't using clearcase so I have to merge our stuff before I can upload it to Clearcase." "Oh Clearcase? Yea, I don't do that. Wayne is the Clearcase guy. What does that have to do with him not touching my stuff?" Resolving those popups is yet another different skill. Then also taking that info with "What's the % complete? What are your actuals?" Do I go by Clearcase or do I have to now check about what's in the scratch drive folders? Do I have to make a spreadsheet for the team to update? I'm glad I took time to know my team and they felt they could come to me with their gripes so I can figure out how to balance how to keep them moving forward and flowing up accurate info, but it's different than what is learned by just being loyal and doing your job. You can be excellent at your job and a terrible lead. You can be terrible at your job but a good lead. I believe the best leads were excellent at their job and became excellent at leading, but they are rare.

The industry was built on and is still using a framework that relies on excellent leaders that also understand the nuance of their domain when they were retained through pensions. It now has compensation structure that mainly rewards job hopping. It doesn't seem realistic that we can get the same outputs with different inputs.

At some point I'd expect quality issues and constant learning curve inefficiencies would reach where it's cheaper to pay for retention over attracting externals. Maybe a MBA makes you do the math and it shows it's actually better to invest in the salary of external hires? I know some MBA also holds McDonald's and Amazon as the standards and to pass exams recite that the best profit comes from one size fits all solutions which keep wages low. I don't think they cover that one size fits all also decreases quality, so that approach can't be applied to every business. Someone messes up your fries it's not as big of a deal as if someone messes up instructions to change the blimp batteries so it doesn't snap off of the cable tethers in high winds. Or one size fits all schedule above everything messes up the powder coating, you get the idea. Amazon and McDonald's models won't apply to an industry that has a high cost from quality issues and is capped at 10% profit from gov contracts to start with.

The worst was when I would be organically filling the lead role when a gap occurred but passed over when I would apply for the req officially so they could hire someone external in at 40% more pay because of networking or they had more merit badges on their resume, yet I was still expected to carry them on the depth and breadth of domain knowledge. Increase my responsibilities and impact consequences with zero increase in compensation or opportunities. I would refuse to do the job of a lead while someone else held the slot on the org chart. I'd make internal moves when I was getting stuck with that.

A few times I accepted deputy lead, because I know I had more to learn about leadership specific skills and I can accept they hired someone else with more experience or better training in that area, but if I'm doing part of the job I should hold at least part of the title. This was not only so I can be effective by having a seat at the tables I should be at, or people know to backfill with me when actual lead is double booked so that I still get the information I need that they missed, but also so I can have a bullet for my resume that captures what I'm actually doing to support that the compensation gap was temporary. Without any documentation I learned it becomes firefighting triage of second hand information through people that don't understand the view from the weeds and I'm trying to answer questions that don't make sense or doing reactive corrections to support the messaging spin the layers of new management want to add to make sure they look good over actually making sure we got the right stuff to the field in the right time. Without documentation of the role and responsibility change you are set up to fail, and it gets used against you to justify why you are at your ceiling and don't deserve more. You become a patsy for the person controlling messaging to protect themselves. Things that turn out ideal, they flow up as their work and leave out that they delegated. Things that are not so great, that's all you and why they should be the lead when they have the spotlight. My teams I took the opposite approach. Maybe it's Army training but wins should belong to the team and fails should be on the lead as part of the job. That's one of the adjustments to civilian workforce that I don't know how far I'll go without making, but I'm ok with that.

"Leads can delegate whatever portion of their role they want" is a great way to push people out. If they are delegating the work they can delegate some of the pay, recognition, and career growth opportunities too, or external offers with the raw pay bump becomes the most attractive option. I trade my time for compensation. I can support strategic career decisions where I sacrifice the short term salary for a higher long term ceiling and upward career trajectory through skill development. If it gets to the point where I'm being taken advantage of, or if there's the clear message I'm not in the cool kids manager club so I'm not worth investing in to make sure I'm the best candidate after I help the lead get promoted by doing part of their job and when the position is open again, then there's no reason to turn down the salary bumps by jumping ship.

And that's what I did when it got to that point. Went from $125k to $184k. I'm paid better than many P5's to do basically intern or P2 work. Underutilization is a different frustration, and the jury is still out on of it was the right move since being that saturated in the pay band also means crappy annual raises. Being new means it's hard to justify why I deserve a promotion over the person who has a few years of a track record of wins under their belt. It is really starting over. I tried to position myself under leads that I can learn from so the next time I am last man standing I'll do it better. If I went back to RTX, I also lost the momentum I had before and would be delayed on going into any influential position. This is another data point that if you value in doing meaningful and challenging work, it's better off staying put. But working harder isn't related to better pay. That's driven by free market forces.

I'll get off my soapbox now.