yes its awesome to have my work merged, even though Im not supposed to be doing a lot of coding. But what is equally awesome is when the junior developer who I manage does the implementation work I laid out and gets her PR merged. Even better if it can get through with her defending all of the choices she made (even if we pair on it) versus coming to me to help in the comments.

I sympathize because even being a team lead has reduced my coding enough I sometimes code in my free time to make up for it cuz I enjoy it.

But I think your mistake is saying only those who love coding are “most inspiring” and most “get shit done”. There’s definitely lots of people who love to get shit done who are indifferent about coding.

I miss it so much. But there’s a different satisfaction with seeing a big team happy, motivated and successful (and hopefully the team taking all the credit rather than you!).

I’m hoping I can go back and IC for a bit…

It’s a different reward that’s more subtle than coding.

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.