Early in my career I worked at a large company where the average dev age was late 30s. Quite a few of these people had taken a stab at management and returned

Early in my career I worked at a large company where the average dev age was late 30s. Quite a few of these people had taken a stab at management and returned to development. Basically I was told this much - don't do it unless you're done with coding and desire to rise up the company ranks. 9 years ago I did such a bang-up job as the lead on a medium size product that I was offered a promotion to management. The first thing I asked was "can I still code?". No. I got my CS degree because I like doing that. Turned it down and accepted a promotion to a principal dev instead. Still, I was rather miserable in that environment. A year later I rebooted my career from .NET enterprise dev -> Rails consultant for early stage start-ups, best thing I ever did in my 20 years as a dev. You're hired by your company to perform a job for a certain comp package. You're not there for charity. If you're not happy change things up. Your reports will carry on without you, and if things are that bad in your absence, will also carry on to hopefully higher planes.