Other than a building boom, the nearly 20 years had brought few changes to the campus. It was still clean and beautiful, and the only thing missing was the group of Hacky Sack players on the quad, who had been replaced by the decidedly more violent Society for Creative Anachronism kids, wearing armor and shields and whacking each other (rather hard) with wooden swords.

I'm now at an age when I'm supposed to get nostalgic for my college days, and I was. What if I could go back and be a student again? The learning (and drinking, I suppose) called to me, and it got me thinking about a lot of managers I know.

At one time or another, most technical managers long to do technical work. For most of us, hands-on production dominated our early careers, and just as a yearning for youth reached out to me, technical work sends out a siren's call to managers.

But, as opposed to my consequence-free indulgent fantasy, heeding the call of technical work endangers the careers of managers and the health of their projects.

Why is this desire so common? I've got a few theories: