[human_banana]

Wow, so many people who lack the skills to be a manager dismissing it. I've worn several hats during my time, and doing manager stuff was the hardest. Dealing with interpersonal relations on the team, managing expectations from internal and external clients. Translating tech speak to and from marketing speak. Running code reviews, etc, etc.

It's a hard job. And there are a lot of people that are bad at it that get put in that role anyway. A good manager does way more than you'll ever see, because he's dealing with a world of crap so work can be done.

It so much easier to sit and work on one programming task than to try to keep an eye on all the "big picture" and "small picture" stuff at once.

Once I had a programmer who had an idea for a different data structure for one of our code bases that made generating the objects faster, as the cost of slowing read time a bit. He couldn't fathom the idea that even though his new structure would be good for HIM, the other teams that process that data are not going to be happy if each read is slower.