Nice to find a kindred spirit. In the past I've spent 20+ years working as an IT contractor. That's one way of utilising technical skills to achieve "manager money" but it's certainly not suited to everybody.

It does grate sometimes when you find yourself working for an incompetent manager who has been prometed "out of harm's way" but fortunately that hasn't happened in the past few years (the fact that both my current and previous bosses are on this forum has nothing to do with that sentiment ;-)).