"If I were to ask the other parrot which job is best for me, which one would they choose?"

Then pick the other one.

For example maybe in 5 years you expect to be a manager or a team leader but we don't expect openings.

You can predict what openings will be available in your company five years in advance?

Or are you saying that you never promote employees to managerial positions and that policy's been around for so long the chances of it changing in the next five years are pretty slim?

What if you don't want to advance as a technical employee? And it's got nothing to do with how difficult the work is, but because people higher up the technical ladder in that particular company have to deal with much more managerial-level effluent? Or because there aren't any higher-level jobs which involve the particular mix of tech and person skills you just happen to be great at?

Agreed. I've worked jobs where, after a couple of years, I've been leaned on to apply for upcoming supervisory and managerial roles. I told the leaners that if I'd wanted those positions, I would have applied for them. Particularly the supervisory positions where I would be getting paid the same rate to accomplish nothing all day except from filling in forms, being bored out of my skull at meetings, and riding herd on former co-workers who had the brains of a duck.

I was actually fairly happy at my job at the time, and one thing I did not want in my career was to have to be a clearing-house for whining going up the ladder and bullshit coming down it. I really, really, REALLY did not want to be in a position where my effectiveness would largely be measured based on how well other people did their job.

It'd definitely be a plus if the IT department was set up to handle things at all levels. Unfortunately, a lot of the time they're only funded enough to look into a minimum set of solutions, and only solutions which tick all the big-app boxes (the reasoning being that something with a bazillion functions which can be rolled out to a thousand users must have a better ROI than something with fewer functions used by fewer staff).

It is possible to turn this around and get the IT department revamped in the way you want, but it generally involves a lot of gentle pressure from the staff, a lot of patient quiet arguing for the additional funding and smaller, faster ROIs, and one or two successful small projects which show that operating on the smaller level won't cause problems for the company infrastructure as a whole.