Funnily enough, it's the same thing in academia/research. You get into it because you like doing research and you (think you) are good at it. And if you are rea

Funnily enough, it's the same thing in academia/research. You get into it because you like doing research and you (think you) are good at it. And if you are really good (and have a healthy dose of luck), eventually you progress to being a professor, you are principal investigator of some projects, and you find out that your job now consists mainly of managing a group of people -even if you aren't especially good at management and haven't been trained for it- and writing grant applications, and you have almost no time for actual research. The difference is that in academia is not an explicit promotion that moves you from research to management, but more of a boiling frog kind of situation where you gradually do less and less research and more and more management - or at least this has been my experience.