Although I am not near retirement, I've found there is a sort of sweet-spot to be found doing "kinda" management stuff while still emphatically being a hands-on

Although I am not near retirement, I've found there is a sort of sweet-spot to be found doing "kinda" management stuff while still emphatically being a hands-on full-time coder. I.e. you can proactively do just enough project management, meetings, and architectural discussions so that people leave you alone the rest of the time to code, but you get enough influence to get things largely how you want them to be (i.e. no surprises/stupid decisions forced on you by a PHB). It requires some drive & gumption to decide to do these things yourself and then the requisite organisational & social skills to schedule the meetings with people, make connections between teams, start the shared design-doc/slides/whatever, generally get people together and "make things happen" etc, but I've found that "the management" value this sort of mini-manager thing hugely, with the bonus that you are not just a passive passenger on the decisions being made about the work you do, but you are actively shaping it because it is you who is out there driving the agenda by just enough. I can easily see this sort of role being viable into retirement if I wanted - people seem to really value an engineer who can do this sort of thing.