[msteffen]

As someone who went from IC to management, my perspective is that getting PRs merged is still that satisfying. I just don't have to be the author of the PR.

More generally, I think some ICs do think that if managers and meetings went away, ICs could just write code distraction-free. But as anyone who's rushed to merge a PR before a colleague so that they have to deal with the merge conflict can tell you, engineers often don't get along, actually. Managers keep the company from getting stuck or thrashing when the engineers don't agree, and most of managing is brokering agreements of one kind or another.