But I've also spent the last 9 weeks doing nothing but reading resumes, phone screens, and interviewing candidates. Staring at an excel spreadsheet mix of engineers I could out-code, great developers I can't afford, internal politics, and emailing recruiters all day, isn't what I went into engineering for. Being judged on my projected demeanor in meetings, ability to navigate politics, and clear bureaucratic hurdles for my team isn't itself enjoyable... its soul-sucking and stressful.
And remember back to things you did while coding that had similar levels of distaste/discomfort. In my experience, good engineers develop tools around doing the 'scut work' of engineering (checking regressions, processing code review comments, validating doxygen/documentation, Etc.) Whether it is setting aside a time, or coding some tools to automate the parts that are automatable (is that even a word?), and then as they switch from 'senior engineer' to 'manager' they have either forgotten or greatly damped down the memories of themselves making the painful things less painful.
Take resume scanning for example. When I started managing each new resume was like a brand new unrelated to anything before it, document. Each to be parsed, cataloged, evaluated, and then dispatched. Time consuming and sometimes mind numbing. To combat that I started writing down things that were common factors, things that turned out to be red flags at the interview, things that the recruiter could have screened prior to me seeing the resume, and in working with recruiters on their 'rejected' pile things that screened that shouldn't have. After hiring and managing enough people I started getting a better feel for the folks who I could work with and those who would be challenging. I also started looking at teams as a pool of skill sets rather than an individual set of skills. So if the team already had a skill covered it wasn't critical that the latest hire had it, but it was critical that they could cross train it.
As a result, scanning resumes stopped being a soul sucking waste of time, and I started "coding" my own process for processing them efficiently. Thinking of recruiters as a variant on lexical analyzers that needed to be tuned to return the right candidates, and ways to look at the candidate to identify skill sets that people don't often write down directly. Have they always worked in small groups? or large? Is their exposition full of more inclusive language or exclusive language. When I can, I like to 'blind' a resume, as names can trigger internal biases. The evaluation process becomes more like reading code and "running it" in my head. I got pretty good at reading code and being able to guess if it was going to work correctly, with time I've gotten better at reading resumes and guessing if they will fit into the current organization.
As you apply more of your analytic skills that you used every day programming to your management challenges (obviously with fuzzier variables and more opaque motivations of third parties) it starts to feel more like engineering and less burdensome.