this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Middle management especially basically only exist in the numbers they do because of in office work culture, which is very often just distractions from actual work.
80% of their 'job' is either useless or counterproductive to what the organization is actually, or at least supposedly, designed and intended to do, and they know that a mass adoption of a paradigm that makes this obvious would lead to them not having jobs.
So we get masses of propaganda to disabuse us of the notion that their mostly useless 'work' needs to exist in the way that it can.
This is made all the more ironic (and horrifying) when you know that most of these people also profess to care about the poor, the climate, but that's less important than feeling like queen bees in their corpo hives, so fuck anything that might actually significantly reduce co2 emmissions and significantly increase the quality of life for a huge amount of workers.
Nah, a good manager would change your opinion. A good manager is a filter and barrier from corporate bullshit. They'll enforce on you what clearly needs to be done, and they'll handle menial paperwork shit on their own. It's more efficient for the manager to fill out the same form five times for five people than it is for each person to fill out that form individually. For an individual, it might take half an hour each. For the manager doing it five times, it'll take twenty minutes for the first one, and 5 minutes for each additional form.
A good manager will argue back until what whatever they want you to do with your timesheet makes sense before they have you do it. A good manager is a great asset and a huge benefit for everyone involved.
I have worked many different tech jobs precisely because all the managers were as I described, or, they outright told me I was being exploited and should work elsewhere, and showed me the documentation to prove it.
My last manager was a very, very wonderful person who I got along with great.
Someone who actually fostered employee's ability to work and grow and gain skills, as opposed to just issuing orders one moment, being unreachable without explanation most of the day, and then popping by with a new personality hours later to explain how to do something i already knew how to do.
He did almost everything you mention and more, it was the shock of my life up to that point to find someone like that.
We hit it off so well that I was basically his double within 6 months and began taking on many of his tasks so he could catch up on things he was behind on.
That is when I began much, much more interactions with managers and team leads of other departments, and found that most of them were so totally incompetent that I had to interview most of them team members to figure out what the process I was supposed to be documenting even were.
Team after team, each manager and each of their underlings described entirely different and contradictory work processes which we were attempting to just understand, before attempting to evaluate how or if to streamline and standardize many disparate digital and physical paper procedures.
I unfortunately lost that job due to a series of crimes happening to me that ruined my life, but I absolutely would have loved to stay at that job despite being surrounded by incompetent morons, because I had at least finally found my own really good manager and team.
I am not saying all managers are as awful as my previous post, that everything they do is useless.
I am saying that a vast majority of them are incompetent and a vast majority of them would be obviously seen as basically just chit chatting as 80% of their job, which is at best a waste of time, and at worst, actively harmful to the work of others, when you remove the physical office environment.
Of course there are exceptions to this, good managers do exist, but they are by far the exception.
100% this. My first manager at my current job was in middle management at the time and is far and away the best manager I've ever had and one key reason I've stayed at my current job for nearly 10 years. He kept the typical corporate bullshit away and allowed his team to thrive. He's a director now but thankfully the managers under him have maintained a similar philosophy.
One thing I learned over the years is that there is zero training in being a good manager. Promotions to management are based upon two things: technical expertise or relationships (brown-nosing/nepotism etc.) Having managerial skills is completely unnecessary for the job.
Very few "managers" take the time to observe, study, and gain the skill set needed when they are in the job. Most end up regurgitating the most recent MBA bullshit fad.
Time to get your Seven Sigma black belt so you can synergize silo'd teams into efficient fusion collaborators via Lean Agile development paradigms and maximize productivity!
Did I make up or misuse some of those terms?
Maybe! I don't care!
In my experience its all just 'I learned some new lingo which makes me very cool and also very serious and important', but its only function is to create social etiquette hierarchies and obfuscate and overcomplicate meetings and directives to the point they don't mean or accomplish anything.