I like that idea as well, but the problem is that your manager will, over the long term, change. Most people have no insurance against some person they've never met being hired above them. You need enough independent credibility to protect yourself against that. You have 5 years of managerial experience, so you probably have enough work experience that any job move would be a likely promotion, so your company has incentives not to treat you badly.

I used to think the software industry was about programming: writing great code to solve hard problems. It's not. It's about credibility and technical risk. The software industry is 90% industry and only 10% software. Most of your time will be spent convincing people to allow you to do useful stuff, not actually doing useful stuff.

The ironic thing is that, as software jobs increasingly slide toward looking more like widget-making and less like research, programmers become a lot less effective. Valve established that open allocation works. (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...) Every other software shop has proven that the alternative (still more popular) doesn't.

The Death of R&D, I think, will be looked upon as the "conscious" decision (of course, large groups such as nations do nothing "consciously"; it's a historian's metaphor) of the United States to go from a world leader to third-rate in a few decades.