This is a great post. Another path is into sales. If you have a deep understanding of technology, are able to help people use it to solve their problems, and you can communicate the value to buyers, then you can do quite well in sales. (It's also helpful if you know a thing or two about how to dress and you like to drink.)

Another friend started out in programming and IT, but he migrated to a sales engineer job where he works for [big infrastructure vendor] to design solutions for their clients.