This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power

This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power. From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible. So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state. (I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)