Me, too. I didn't hate it, but it was time to go. As one moves up the hierarchy, there is less opportunity for keeping technical skills fresh. I didn't want to be a coder for 40 years, I wanted higher-value positions that had more impact on the business.
I've been through file-based ISAM/VSAM systems in COBOL and PL/1; IBM 360/370 JES/JCL systems; VM & TSO; early 4GL languages like FOCUS and NOMAD2; the advent of SQL with IMS, DB2, and Oracle; 3-tier client/server systems with PowerBuilder and Composer; SAP; and Agile/Scrum.
Forty years later, the technologies were changing again with cloud-based SaaS, IaaS, and IoT. It was just time to go. I saved my retirement portfolio and it's time to live work-free for the next 25 years.
-PJ
I started with Burroughs supporting their mainframes, back then virtually nothing was compatible from vendor to another, when I moved into networking deployment I never wanted to take hands off the keyboard, fear of losing a technical edge and the ability to move from one business to another because Cisco switches and routers were the same regardless of company. Later on I went into Cisco Voice Deployments building Cisco Call Manager and Voice Mail Servers
I was a team leader a couple of times, one time at a Cisco Technical Assistance Center supporting Cisco routers and wide area networks but it was a thankless job