I work at a small'ish company of few FTE (~10 members and handful of interns/ residents). I am basically the most senior non-C level member within a relatively

I work at a small'ish company of few FTE (~10 members and handful of interns/ residents). I am basically the most senior non-C level member within a relatively flat management hierarchy (by design). I handle a small corner of product development i.e. B2B 3D asset development from multimedia. Every weekly meeting my progress report is modest. You might bin me into that 0.1x engineering member. Yet, I could tell you I remain quite busy. 33% of my time goes into product development. The other 67% are into quasi-employee management tasks (quarterly performance checks, their salary/bonus/increments, merging their code branches, keeping tabs on infrastructure), Capital generation (meeting investors, putting engineering-sensible business plans, correspondence etc) & PR (showing up at conferences, keeping updated with latest tech by reading papers, building professional networks to access talent/ investors/ experts on corp's behalf.) If looking at purely my LOC, I probably add half or a third of the average guy right now. I know it could be better - and I keep trying to improve my IC role. But the message I want to let know is: A lot of things are going on without others being plastered with updates. And that happens with gradual seniority in org chart. Do I miss my TopCoder days? Yes absolutely. Will I start doing that now? Probably not. Someone has to help run the engineering team. All that coding might is useless if we run out of workplace cohesion and investor money. And I am uniquely positioned to do that. I would like to see the team run rumbling along rather than few Usain Bolts sprinting in their chosen directions.