[tat45]

I was a manager and a lead technical analyst (basically a CTO with a much narrower scope than a full company). I now refer to the nine years I spent doing this so-called "work" as The Lost Years, because I wrote very, very little code and my skills dried up.

There are some people who enjoy it. But I found it to be exactly as unfulfilling you described it, for much of the same reasons (spent too much time fighting management fires and not enough time solving technical problems), and it ultimately drove me back to being a software developer. Thank goodness my skills hadn't atrophied completely, but I'm definitely behind my cohort in terms of expertise, and I spend too many cycles regretting the lost time I could have spent growing my skills.