[kristjan]

There's some amount of zen to it. Your job is no longer to be the best coder yourself, it's to make everyone else the best coders they can be. I don't have kids yet, but I can imagine some similarities.

On the other hand, once a month or so I hide from the office for an afternoon/night and replace some infrastructure or build an internal tool that's never going to get prioritized. Everyone's happy about it, and you get to feel like a bit of a hero :)

[dasil003]

There is so much zen to it. I've gone from being the single developer sitting in a room with the founder and the creative director building a product from scratch to managing a technical team of 15 at the same company, with another couple dozen employees in other departments.

The difficulty of running a large technical team is all about managing coordination and communication overhead. You need to build a culture where interruption is frowned upon, but at the same time you need to ensure that knowledge isn't siloed. The balance is very very important, and the means of achieving it are much more art than science. I suppose I could throw up my hands and concede I'll never be able to regain the focus to be a good individual contributor, but I rebel against that inclination on the (perhaps selfish) belief that going full management would put me out of touch with the people I'm managing.

In any case, it is possible to both manage and write code, but it requires an incredible amount of discipline to truly embody the nature of each job and do them well side by side.