Engineers and scientists, who have spent years acquiring technical skills, sometimes fail to recognize that management is a skill too. It's true that being a manager comes naturally to some people, but being a truly great leader is a skill as rare as being a truly great software developer. Most people have to work very hard to acquire management skills, especially people management skills. I don't think the hardest part of being a good manager is having great budget projection skills, or being able to put together a flow chart or Gantt chart for a project. Those are the mechanics of management. Being great means hiring, motivating, rewarding and promoting great people, and getting rid of the others.
It is also true that great management skills are valued and rewarded more highly than great technical skills. In every company, the CEO will probably make more than the highest paid technical people. Think about Gates and Allen, or Jobs and Woz, and countless other cases and you'll see that the bulk of the compensation goes to the person who organizes and runs the company, not the person with the technical vision. So get used to it.
