There is a advantage I see very few people talk about publicly but saw all the time: no more pressure to run the dev skills treadmill. No more need to keep up with the latest JavaScript frameworks, or the latest micro-weave clustered engine architecture fad of the day. No more signalling technical superiority for promotions.
Many dev managers breathe a sigh of relief since they feel they "no longer need to keep up" and let their skills atrophy.
Being a manager in a company with more than 25 developers is a new arena that is often even more competitive, but the rules are totally different. No one gives a shit if you're the best engineer in the room, but if you still want promotions you need to learn all the new ways to show your value. It becomes about telling the most compelling stories, doing great research to prove your points, using charisma to charm the right people, and being clever or lucky to lead projects you can turn around or have a big impact. The things that will get you promotions as a manger are rarely tied to team performance, and often tied to people's _perception_ of their performance. I realize this sounds cynical, but it's just the reality of how politics is played, and management almost always is playing politics.
I was a manager for many years, and then director of several teams for a few years. I was next in line to be CTO of a 1000+ developer company when I walked away to become an IC again.
I just missed it too much.
However, I'm very social and love people. I love scheming new ways to do things or improve things. I really enjoyed one on ones with most employees (which was good, at one point for a year I was managing 25 people, and one on ones took 15-20 hours of my week!). Sometimes it was terrible, mostly with high performers who resented the process or people who were quiet quitting. Most of the time it was people who just wanted to get better, and I loved helping them scheme out how I could help. I did everything I could to help my people succeed and get promotions, and they often were loyal and hard-working in return.
I love building a team of people who are gelled together, who feel a real sense of belonging. I very much missed the fast dopamine feedback of TDD, but I learned to enjoy slower metrics like:
- reducing WIP limits (down to 0.5 stories per dev, started at 3.1 per dev when I started)
- increasing dev retention rates (my teams were up to 6 years average! It was 2.3 when I started!)
- reducing dev weekly meeting minute averages (my teams down to 3 hours of meetings per week average! It was 15 hours when I started!)
- prioritizing technical debt payoff (it was 50% of the time when I left, up from 20%)
- ensuring all devs had unstructured research time (10% weekly)
- ensuring teams prioritized high value efforts like CI/CD, one button deployments, etc
- making my product high profit margin (it was 100% ROI three years running, up from 30% when I started)
Building a place devs loved to work and wanted to stay was extremely rewarding.
Ultimately, the politics of the boardroom and upper management really ground me down. Eventually, the company wanted to move development to India, with me managing larger teams there while reducing my American staff, and I just got burnt out and left.
There's a universe where I manage a team again, and possibly will be doing so this year, but for now I'm loving getting to play with tailwind, digging into vite, and cranking out out CRUD forms.