[CyberFonic]

I have taken multi-year breaks from programming several times (network engineer, academic, etc). To me it feels great to have a change of pace and focus. Have been in biz dev role too. After a while that too became boring - same issues, different faces.

The biggest stumbling block in "solutioning" is when the programmers responsible for implementing your vision drop the ball and you have to face the customer and explain the delay, cost over-run, etc. For me that was too stressful over the long-run.