Something I've observed in academia but I suspect is true in industry as well: as you become more senior, you'll find that you can be much more productive if you spend all your time being a manager and letting junior people do all the real work. But after a few years of this, you're likely to lose your skill at doing the work yourself, the opportunity to practice that skill, and the gratification of doing so that drew you to your chosen profession in the first place. And you'll probably also get worse at being a manager as you lose touch with the actual work. Avoiding managerdom is hard. You have to give up substantial short-term productivity gains. If you're in academia in a tenure track, you risk not getting tenure by being less productive. And personally I find that switching between thinker mode (deep work with no distractions for a whole day) and manager mode (a thousand quick but urgent tasks) to be highly unpleasant. When I'm in thinker mode, it kills me that people have to wait a day (often a lot more) for a 1-minute response from me that could unblock them on what they're stuck on and save them hours of work. When I'm in manager mode, it kills me that I have all these creative ideas sloshing around in my brain that I'm not able to execute on. So it's extremely tempting to perpetually be in just one mode or the other. When you have a team, not managing them is not an option, but being a pure manager is an option. That makes a constant struggle to carve out time for your own work and not give in to the temptation. Note: I think this is only tangentially related to Founder Mode vs Manager Mode. It's much more related to another Paul Graham essay, Maker's Schedule vs Manager's Schedule. And Deep Work by Cal Newport is very relevant.