Three years is more than enough for a good and motivated programmer to become disillusioned and want to be a manager to "escape" or to "do it better". Only to fall in the same traps previous engineer-turned-managers fell into.

One of the things that I've started to say to friends for the past few years is that "The worst thing that I ever did was to turn a hobby into a full-time job."

I mean that only half-seriously. I imagine how much worse it would be to do something I did not enjoy doing previously even as a hobby.

Still, the motivation dies from a thousand cuts, until all that remains is looking forward to having more free time, so that one can finally do really interesting things.

Unless one is afforded John Carmack-levels of autonomy...