But choosing to stay away from management also means you won’t distribute tasks or motivate people (at least not the way most people consider it should be done).

From what you write I understand you have power to decide what exactly you’re going to do. If I were you I’d choose one side, either people management or technical leadership, and stick with it as much as possible. If your choice is technical leadership you can always switch to people management later. The other way around it’s much harder.

Does this make any difference in you opinion?

If you look for a way to leverage knowledge and experience you shouldn’t think about management but about technical leadership. This doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t if you ask me) be done through promoting a person to management position where he gets a team to supervise. You should rather think about all kind of guru roles, where a person has all the engineering tasks but is also a go-to guy when itcomes to technical advice or even decisions.

Call them tech leads, architects or whatever, but don’t give them teams to manage since all these administrative tasks (like performance reviews, budgeting etc) steal a lot of time. Time which you could use either on coaching others or on engineering tasks.

I guess that one programmer can become so valuable that having him just write code isn’t efficient enough. You have to fin a way to scale his knowledge/influence and that can be done through some sort of delegation/leadership/managing.

So the trick is to add some management but to stay strong in technology or it will all lose sense. I have tried to be Scrum Master, Product Owner and Technical Leader. The result is that I suck in every area.

But I have in my mind a combination that would work. :)

I fully agree you can't be a competent architect while not being a programmer any more. E.g. I can say a lot about architecture, I can have great advice on the subject but I won't work out whole architecture There's too much about modern technologies I just don't know since I don't code any more.

Talking about trying to be half programmer and half manager, well, soon you'll just have to make a decision which one you like more. Other way you'll struggle to have enough time for either one.

One thing I am sure for now, you can't be architect/leader etc. and not be a active programmer.

Still I will try to walk this impossible road of half manager/half programmer…