"Choosing" is the keyword tricky phrase here.

At my last job interview, the "what do you plan on doing 5 years from now?" question came up. After talking up things that interested me that could fill 5 years of time, he asked me about management aspirations. I confessed that I had no personal interest.

He followed with something about how he wished it was "realistic" for himself to stay in non-managerial roles. Apparently, there are a lot of programmers out there that feel some kind of pressure to move into management at some point if they want to stay in the I.T. game.