I am also one of those techy types and beginning to realize this. It was hard for me to understand why so many of my peer academics /want/ to get promoted into

I am also one of those techy types and beginning to realize this. It was hard for me to understand why so many of my peer academics /want/ to get promoted into administrative positions. But maybe they just realized they were already doing a full-time administrative job, just with a teaching load on top of it. If you do stay involved in research, you spend more time hassling over a grant proposal that's a 1-in-10 shot than you would actually doing the technical work if you won the grant.