[hga]

Indeed, I can't disagree with anything you say.

But here's something that instead of entirely delegating, that at least for me is "hands on work": teaching (note also huddo121's recommendation that your formally codify your knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13061109). In fact, I'd say that one of the single most useful things I learned in high schoool, was JROTC's section on teaching, the Army and military in general of course are constantly teaching people things, heck, not all that long after my father got posted to a radar picket ship in the North Atlantic in the mid-50s, he became the junior officer who broke in brand new officers (he was Grand Lakes enlisted->OCS/only in for 4 years; I would have gone SROTC if not for my eyesight). And perhaps I picked up something of how to teach from his deliberate teaching of me and my siblings of how to hunt, fish, shoot and drive.

So look for some opportunities to mentor your more junior developers, and in terms of delegating, look for opportunities there as well. This can be fantastically rewarding, a win-win-win for you, the mentee, and the company, one of my "mentees" remains to this day one of my best friends.

Note also the knowledge transfer can go both ways, in that above case, I was learning C++ for the project, which he helped, and I helped him drop down to C, he'd only done C++ in college, so like the first thing I taught him was C's new is malloc ^_^.

One other thing to try, perhaps, although I've never been a manager position where all my time could be spent on managing, is to make a very specific segregated task that you'll spend a very finite time "hands on" doing, and don't pull rank when you come into conflict with your subordinates as you're acting as one of their peers.

I'd almost certainly put doing that off for some number of months to a year or so, take in your mind an official vacation from "getting your hands dirty" unless faced with an existential threat, and just focus on the managing.

Other things, especially from the military viewpoint: make it your job to keep your "troops" well fed, healthy, protected from your sub-par superiors, etc. Maybe even explcitly look into the officer/non-commissioned officer/grunt distinctions, they provide a model of something that works, albeit imperfectly as all things human, and in our world of high tech you definitely have to avoid certain forms of that. I.e. D-Day no, mission-type tactics perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics