nope, I've delivered considerable value to my team by essentially letting the people who enjoy shipping end user features do that, and extracting frameworks and libraries so that the overall product stays coherent and easy to work with, or occasionally stepping in and saying "why don't you let me build the general pieces for this feature first, and then you can use them to make your life easier". as long as you have a decent feel for yagni, it's a useful role to play.

> go into teaching instead?

if teaching earned me as much as a commercial programming job, then yes. Unfortunately, most teaching positions are fairly poorly paid (compared with the qualifications required and the opportunity cost). That's a sad fact, but one has to consider it.

You have that backwards. People who don't enjoy these things should go in to management

People who enjoy actually building and shipping something instead of creating abstractions should go into management?

You do realize that this includes all the hackers with the original sense of the term, which are not about finely tuned abstractions and design patterns, but about creating things and hacking/kludging it out to get there faster?