“you’re really good at this and enjoy it so let’s get you into middle management where you won’t do it anymore and will hate your life”
Yep.
“Field promotions” we used to call them. I have done the management thing, I was “okay” at it, but it wasn’t my passion.
It’d be fine if the pay raise matched the workload.
Triple my responsibility while giving me a 25¢ raise smh my head
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I was in management before I moved to engineering full time. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed my team and watching them grow and develop their skills. I also learned a lot about things that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.
The key role of a good leader is to remove “log jams” and then get out of the way. But I was log-jammed out. An incredibly toxic workplace has a way of doing that. I fought hard for my employees. They deserved that. They had my respect and they earned it. If I had to go back and fight for them again, I would. But man, it’s been nice to get away from all that for the past few years.
So this is me a couple weeks ago when my boss tells me he wants me to take over as one of the team leads and on the outside I’m like, “Thanks for the opportunity! I appreciate the vote of confidence.” And on the inside I’m like, “…please no.”
I had been a servant leader for a number of years in a big corporation in a remote location where I could break away from their older 50’s style management structure. I had a great crew that was able to do wonderful things. The company took notice and wanted me to move to other locations. I wasn’t interested in moving so far away. I would be sent to train and show other locations how we streamlined so well. We eventually closed down our location as the largest customer *we served closed after 90 years.
I was going to walk away from it all then one of my old customers wanted me to come and help them grow, move, and re-invent themselves. I was able to bring in some of the old crew and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Having the ownership in the location didn’t make it easy as they were into the old 50s style mentality so it was a constant fight to implement all the great things they loved about my old location that served them. I was pretty burnt out by the end with being left to navigate Rona on my own with the crews when ownership went and hid in their homes. They didn’t take it seriously at first and then when they flipped it was left in my hands to deal with while they freaked out about the end of the world.
Eventually they sold to a larger company and I was excited for this change. Turns out the new company spouted everything that sounded good but they were so disfunctional and full of themselves it was tough. I was glad to go when they folded our location into another existing one.
I miss working with the people daily and helping them grow and remove those road blocks but I was tired out by the latest ownership disfunction especially when they drank their own Kool aid so much they couldn’t see how badly they were making it for the staff.
The only saving grace for this last ownership group was the previous ownership was so terrible, the new owners seemed like a good upgrade. They were in some ways. It wasn’t for those of us that had worked for structured and properly run companies. It’s been rough on the staff that remain and the steps backwards they had to endure in the process. The new owners are fairly certain they are doing great things. I wish them all luck and I’m glad to be out.
It’s been tough switching from managing data and processes to managing people. But I make a LOT more money. It’s also nice not having to watch someone else make poor decisions all the time, but I guess now everyone else is now watching me make the poor decisions! 🤦♂️
Great. More responsibility and being the scapegoat for everything bad coming from the ones under you.
I’d need 150% of my salary to start thinking about doing that.That you, Vova?
Yeah… I feel like I contributed so much more before but managing people, but this is where the money is sadly. I went from supply chain/purchasing/logistics manager to operations manager. I used to be a one man team and single handedly saved maybe $200k this year so far, and took our aged inventory from about $1M to basically nothing, all of our KPIs are primo. This is a company that pulls $10M/yr in revenue… small company.
I got rewarded with spending half my time babysitting the warehouse team, getting reamed by my boss when they’re not getting through things fast enough, and fixing their mistakes and bandaiding bad processes. But I got a 30% raise so I guess it’s worth it? I could be doing so much more.
I just straight up tell everyone I have no leadership aspirations. I write that shit on my yearly reviews.
Do they force you into it anyways? Two jobs ago I told them that all the time. They used to make us fill out a career advancement plan every year, and every year I said “I’m exactly where I want to be”, but every 6 months they’d stick me at the head of some team and I’d have to do that for a few months until I weasled my way out of it.
Lol this is my career. I am close to retirement but I always rejected management. Respect the Peter Principle
I’m not close to retirement, but I see this starting to happen to me.
I’m not opposed to managing people, but I would rather self immolate than to review timesheets.
I don’t have any meme that can represent my thoughts in a more precise way.
First thing I told my manager was when he asked me where I wanted to end up was: not managing people
Great for the career, not great for me.
“It’ll be great for your career… But we aren’t going to raise your pay right now for it.”
Hey, the peasants already bought the trickle down, we’ll piss prosperity on you one day economics bullshit, so they’ll believe anything!
I dont care about people’s bullshit so just let me work and not deal with them.
To anyone dreading this for real, there are places where you can get ahead as an IC and it’s considered a parallel career track to management. 0 direct reports. Maybe some mentoring, if you want, but that’s it.
You just have to find those places
My employer has both a technical and a non technical route, but even the technical route will include some small amount of team/project leading.
Managing people is absolutely NOT good for my career. MAYBE it’ll be good for my salary (but I doubt it at my current company).
The problem is that you’ll fall off the technical curve eventually. It’s almost inevitable. Even if you read and study every day and keep up with every bit of technical meta, your brain will slowly turn to goo and you’ll find it hard to stay ahead of younger engineers purely on technical competence alone. At a certain point you need to develop some form of leadership skills so you can turn your experience into a multiplier.
