When I worked at Microsoft, I asked my dev manager why he took such a boring (as perceived by me) job. He said that he'd peaked at how productive he could be personally, and the only way he could improve was to scale out...

A good manager is really, really hard to find. Good developers are easy to find (relative to good managers). So, while I don't want to get into management, I also recommend it to anyone who might have potential in that regard.