The things you enjoy at the early stages of academe are not the things you do as you stay longer. Academic promotion exhausts the older/wiser people with teaching/supervising/admin work instead of using their accumulated knowledge to create new things. Of course, some students might be less naive and are actually aiming for positions per se. But I was one of those types who just wants to solve technical problems and get technical work done.
I am also one of those techy types and beginning to realize this. It was hard for me to understand why so many of my peer academics /want/ to get promoted into administrative positions. But maybe they just realized they were already doing a full-time administrative job, just with a teaching load on top of it.
If you do stay involved in research, you spend more time hassling over a grant proposal that's a 1-in-10 shot than you would actually doing the technical work if you won the grant.
That seems true of many jobs, like programming. Become good enough and eventually you get promoted to manager, director, VP, C-level. You might have loved the joy of programming and making something yourself at some point, but sooner or later most career-successful programmers will become administrators or operators.
