At the same time, I have read from people making the transition from IC to manager that it's a mistake to hold on to your technical work. Surely this will vary

At the same time, I have read from people making the transition from IC to manager that it's a mistake to hold on to your technical work. Surely this will vary from person to person, company to company, and team to team, but I find it hard to believe that people with 10-15+ years of professional dev experience are best utilizing their skills sitting far away from the code; at the same time, they can't get too focused on it and ignore their management responsibilities. I wonder how much of it has to do with team sizes. I feel like a 4 person team (inclusive) would be ideal for a manager who also wanted to act as a technical lead and contribute a moderate amount. Any bigger, and the scope of what your team does, as well as the amount of time needed to devote enough time to all your employees, starts to get too big for you to contribute at a technical (e.g. source code) level. Yet we continue to take great technical workers and put them in this weird PM-hiring-HR-architect mixture of a position where they barely continue to leverage their skills anyway