I concur. It was a eye opening experience to move into management and staff/prin levels after research. The focus was very much more on "doing through others" rather than "doing yourself". For me this felt unnatural. If someone had warned me prior, I'm not sure I'd have made this jump. I'm happily now doing direct RnD again.
For me if your a principal and you're only doing through others your either not looking at it right or doing it wrong. For basically everything I do, I ask myself the question: is this something that I should be doing directly, or something that other people should be doing, or something I should coach people up on doing train them, or build an organization around or whatever. In many cases I will build an organization and it will take 5 to 10 times longer than if I did it myself. But it keeps going for years after I move on to something else, as opposed to stopping the instant I stopped working on it.
What I say to a ton of mentees as they mature into staff/pe, is the important thing is to always figure out what is the highest leverage thing you could be doing. if it's coding, code. if it's writing a doc to explain to other people why other people should be coding, write a doc. if it is slowly nursing junior engineers through a multi-year arc that you could do in a week, maybe that's what you need to do tho I'm seconding guessing that one. But you definitely shouldn't be hanging up the keyboard as a tech ic.
Also as of this week at 9 years at a company, I have now shipped code in almost every language the company uses, and on all but: salesforce, an actual prod sagemaker model (all local prototypes), jira workflows, and SAP.
