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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4271 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 14, 2023

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Does anyone have experience transitioning to a managerial role at work? Did you enjoy it more than your previous role?

Yes, and no i do not enjoy being a manager more than i enjoyed doing field work but more pay and being able to spend more time with the kids and better half certainly is nice.

That said the burdens of command are a burden, feeling and being responsible kinda sucks. But thats also what youre getting paid the big bucks for. So it goes.

I really enjoy the pay as the manager, but I also really enjoyed being an IC. I stopped being a pure IC almost 11 years ago, but at my previous job I kept moving between the roles, ending up as a mix of a team lead and a special projects guy. At the new one I'm much more limited in reach and don't really have time to do special projects. It's 25% status meetings, 25% escalations, 25% bureaucracy and 25% team management. I can't really touch the first three and shouldn't touch the fourth, so rolling up my sleeves and doing something with my own hands means overtime.

It's fine as long as you stay away from project management.

Why's that?

It's boring and stressful. You're essentially an administrator getting yanked in a million directions with little to no power.

Of course this can vary between sectors, organisations and projects but project managment being a kind of shitty gig consistently been my impression from my own career and those of my friends and acquaintances.

This is mostly in the Nordics and UK mind you.

That's an interesting perspective. I've never been a project manager, but I've enjoyed the project management I've done in other roles, and I've considered switching to be one. Yes, project managers are somewhat impotent. I view them as little extension arms of the higher level leaders, to be their eyes and ears on the ground and report back. But I guess if you have a good mind for organization and setting up mechanisms, you don't want to do anything too technical, and you want less power and less responsibility, I feel like it could be alright.

You're not really going to get less responsibility, only less power.

Well truly, I never really understood why anyone wants power at work. Who cares if you have power? It's a paycheck. As long as I'm doing my job and getting paid for it, that's all that matters to me. If I don't get to command anyone, that's just fine with me.

The only way I'd feel differently is if I had a true passion for something that I needed to see done, which I've rarely ever felt about work. And I get the feeling most others feel the same way. We pretend otherwise, since there's an unspoken rule that you need to pretend that you're really passionate about work, but to be honest, it's hard to always be truly passionate about whatever work throws your way, and it's hard to maintain passion for so long when work grinds you down so much.

This is like saying "why do people want money or status?". Power gives you the ability to accomplish things, whether that is furthering your career, helping people, grifting, avoiding work, furthering a cause etc.

What you don't want is responsibility. Power frequently comes with some responsibilities and you have to weigh whether the power is worth the responsibilities, just like you have to weigh whether paycheck is worth the responsibilities.

Well, if you're defining power so generally, why do you feel that as a project manager you get less power but just as much responsibility? Can you indicate the context for what you mean by that? What sort of responsibility are you referring to?

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I did, then moved back. I mostly didn't like having to deal with performance management. I felt like a soulless PoS, and I especially didn't like the concept of having unregretted attrition quotas.

Also, it felt more like I was being judged on my ability to act like a business person, which I know very little about how to do. There seemed to be no real rules, just a notion that you had to keep your reports happy, and then make decisions according to some unspecified ever-changing rubric, that no one really knew. It was all about having to make decisions and then justify them somehow. Basically, work felt more than ever like a game of Calvinball. Now that I'm back to being a high-level software engineer, there is some aspect of Calvinball in my work, but certainly less than as a manager.

I slowly moved from an IC role to a Senior Manager role over the last 3-4 years.

I wouldn't say I enjoy it more, but I've managed to inspire some loyalty in my team by shielding them from BS and going to bat for them.

This gives me some satisfaction.

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