Then I actually ended up in the position where I took on the responsibilities of a Project Manager in the course of building a department. I see it much differently now having worn both those hats as a generalist. You're tracking two different sides of the same body of work, and there is solid value that a good project manager provides in terms of producing a meaningful skeletal specification on which more in depth technical analysis and work can be done.

In addition, not all devs are full on gung ho let me throw something out there that I know will be mostly wrong until the details get filled in by everyone else. As a PM, you're as much the Rock in a pot of Rock Soup as you are the guy in meetings all the time. I've had to eat a lot of humble pie since getting saddled with building a department. The challenge is as much making sure things are in the right place at the right time, defining what the right time is, and making sure to unblock people as they run into obstacles.

It's a completely different type of work from straight up technical work, and is fundamentally destructive to maintaining the fine grained technical context you need to accurately implement something. You don't want to have to do it all at the same time.