I have made plenty of mistakes over 20+ years, and learned the painful way.
All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts are much easier to manage.
How much time do you spend on helping your team members grow? It takes a long time (years not weeks), but this can be very rewarding!
I share my own (humble) insights right here, its a huge topic but I post regularly, you might find some of those posts helpful: https://techleader.pro/
> it just doesn't feel the same in terms of pride in technical achievement .. i.e. my coding days are over
Same for me, I had to learn to take pride in building successful teams and individuals, and not code anymore.
As an ex-engineer, the key "eureka!" moment I had was when I realized that management != leadership, and leadership > management. After that, I started to study "leadership" as a formal topic, everyone from Marcus Aurelius to Steve Jobs, as if I was learning a new programming language for example.
The combination of technical chops + great people leadership skills is very rare, if you nail that many opportunities will open up for you during your career.
Wish you well on your journey.
This cannot be emphasized enough. I have seen lots of smart engineers attempting to "architect" the engineering manager role, while not being able to handle the people aspect at all.
I can stay technical in my role as an individual contributor and be content. IMHO I'd be more valuable to the company in a leadership role...but also at the same time not sure if I want to have to deal with it for a 10% raise.
If it does not suit you in the end, your technical skills will still be there as a fallback option.
Wish you well.
Funny thing is I'd feel less pressure as a senior dev with 9 other college hires, than a new manager w/ 1 senior dev and 9 college hires (even though technically the team would have 2 senior devs including me if the development parts get rough!).
This resonated with me and made me excited to fall back to an IC role for a period: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
What can you, as their manager, do to instead increase their productivity by 10%? Likely many things, and this is a lot more sustainable, because otherwise the team gets neglected from a manager support perspective while you're busy working with them.
Of course, find things to do technically to help the team if you want, that's a great idea. But don't assume that the best thing you can do for them is always to do what they are doing.
That's just ... management. Management is mostly about people, it is mostly about the HOW instead of the WHAT. I'd go one step ahead and make a statement that "Management is mostly about dealing with people's observable behaviours".
If you try to "manage" that, they will resent and resist you.
The best you can hope for is that they like and respect you enough to follow your leadership. But that's their choice.