[ZenoArrow]

I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.

If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.

In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).

[maxxxxx]

As manager in the middle you often feel helpless. You want to help your people but you have nothing to offer. Can't give raises, no place to promote people, top management doesn't support your initiatives. It's a difficult place to be in.

[dagw]

My last manager quit because of that feeling of helplessness. Basically my manager left his manager.

[wetpaws]

Can relate to this.

[nei-takk]

I worked as CTO for a startup, even as CTO I couldn't do anything to help the team, and I had to focus on writing more code than managing. The CEO always had the last word. In the end, I told him that I just want to be a software developer and you can come to me when you're in trouble. The big perk, no more long hours... The bad, I no longer feel any ownership for what I do.

[whatever_dude]

Can relate too. I'm going through this right now and it kills me. I'm not a real manager but I have a number of devs I oversee in some aspects and it's obvious to me some are underused, undervalued, or underchallenged. The problem might be that as a lead I empathize /too much/, but it drives me crazy that in the end I'm just a proxy for communication with very little power for change. I feel like I'm always making up excuses for the company's decisions and that's not good either.

[bcbrown]

You might find this book interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Systems-Unlocking-Mysteries-Or.... It's a great view into the differing perspectives of executives, middle managers, and ICs.

[scarface74]

I bet not all of your peers feel the same way. Some managers are better at playing politics than others and get more resources for their directs.

But I've given up on ever getting a decent raise from a company. I've been prepared to switch companies every two years.

[Balgair]

Middle management people are the graphite control rods of a nuclear reactor, they slow down the process enough to be useful and act as sacrificial elements in the power plant.

The Gervais Principle is a great lens with which to look at company hierarchies and all people in any large organization should know about it: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)

[stevarino]

While I agree with your analogy, graphite is actually a moderator which (in a nuclear context) accelerates reactions. This was a factor for Chernobyl [1] where the rods had graphite tips, so a scram had a momentary rapid increase in reactivity. This burst of reactivity caused temperature to momentarily spike. The heat produced steam which increased pressure and the vessel exploded.

[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pd...

[Balgair]

Cool!

[jbergens]

No, hot

[speby]

> I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.

You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.

Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.

On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.

[dominotw]

I am this exact situation. I love my manager, simply one of the best i've ever worked with. But he is simply is messenger for poor decisions that are made by couple of incompetent people above him.

I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.

[AnAnonyCowherd]

I wish it were as simple as "incompetence."

There's a director-level IT manager where I work which has made my personal job a hassle for years.

There's a follow-on business process to our main process, which was a terrible mess. I wrote a program in a year and a half which vastly simplified the process. The director is mad, because his team of 10 contractors has been unable to write a successful version for 4 years now. (Hundreds of people use my software every day. There are still no production programs using his.) I even told his team's manager how to fix what's broken about their program, and they wouldn't listen. (And then the director fired that manager.)

He wants to own the process because it's important. He needs it to line his nest. So he finally got moves made to put a sympathetic middle manager in place to force me (and my direct boss) to hand over the program to his team to maintain. As they say, if you can't code it, take it over and act like you wrote it. (And charge internal groups $1000/user/year for the privilege of using it.)

Now my job involves improving another follow-on process that's also horribly broken, even worse than the first. And I just found out at lunch today that the director MADE HIS BONES, fifteen years ago, by IMPLEMENTING the horrible process that makes all these other follow-on processes both necessary and nightmarish.

<Queue the Obama WTF GIF>

So my new quote is: "Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained as ruthlessness driven by an inferiority complex."

I'm tired now, so I won't go into how I saw this behavior distort correct outcomes and delay business improvement for personal gain, a long time ago, at another Fortune 250.

[dominotw]

oh my god! I was having a dejavu reading your post. This could have been written by me. I guess this shit is more common than I imagined.

It did teach me a lot of lessons though. Never work for the company, always work for yourself. Accumulate power to make decisions, thinking that writing some kickass code is going get you somewhere is misguided.

[triplesec]

You sound competent and resourceful. Why not move to another company, with a raise / promotion and a better working environment, or strike out on your own?

[kbenson]

> I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions.

A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.

The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

[thr0w__4w4y]

This isn't unique to Google; in fact, every serious tech company I've ever worked at or consulted with has this same policy. It's obvious and makes sense. Does it always work? Unfortunately, no...

[kbenson]

Sure, I didn't mean to imply it was, or that it necessarily always worked, it's just the example I have some limited experience with (or really, just hearing a first hand experience of).

I can imagine some downsides right now, such as employee burnout (since there's going to be some extra responsibilities as you attempt to do your old job and a new one at the same time), and the fact that this time perior, while somewhat long, may still not be nearly long enough to accurately gauge how a person will react in many common scenarios in the new position.

[corpMaverick]

In corporate IT, it is an accepted practice to promote people who don't have hands on experience, or who did the job 20 years ago and haven't followed up on the industry trends. They have a hard time admitting that they don't know and refuse to listen to the competent people in their teams. They don't even know who is competent and who is faking it.

[organsnyder]

Even with leaders with more recent/relevant hands-on experience, it can be difficult. If a leader continues to weigh in on technical decisions without understanding the power dynamics inherent to their position, bad decisions and demoralization of individual contributors (who feel steamrolled) can result.

[onezerozeroone]

Save up a lot of money and build a large network of contacts with whom you have a reputation for being a badass...then you will have no fear of repercussions for speaking out frankly about things.

Eventually it will go to your head and you'll be viewed as a brash, arrogant, out-of-touch upper manager who throws their weight and ego around without appreciation for the repercussions of their horrendous misinformed decisions.

You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the problem.

[triplesec]

Isn't it then incumbent upon your manager to challenge the incompetents above him, or work round them? There has to be a large body of literature and practice on this problem.

[lazyasciiart]

The article is based on data that includes, among other points, that the individual manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and that 50% of Americans had left their job because of the individual manager. If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points. (I am personally about to leave a job because of my individual manager, so I'm inclined to believe the article and study pretty easily).

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, 30% that's not from the individual managers still leaves plenty of people who have never seen this even once in their careers. So there's plenty of, if not exactly counter evidence, then... counter experience?

I once had a manager who had a bunch of people leaving. They were not leaving him, the manager; they were leaving the situation the division was in that put the engineers in difficult working conditions. But the manager had HR interview several of his people, to see if he, the manager, was the problem. He said, "I had to know." (Of course, if he's that honest and that willing to look, you have a pretty good idea that he's not the problem, even before HR comes back with the results.)

[ZenoArrow]

> "If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points."

I'm not here to dispute the figures that were shared in the article, I'm suggesting that the interpretation of those figures was off, as it overlooks the aspects of management that are out of the control of the line/middle manager.

Furthermore, I'm not disputing your own reasons for leaving, as I'm not suggesting the competency of line managers can't be the reason people leave their job.

[dragonwriter]

If the individual manager is bad enough for long enough to make people leave, that in and of itself means there is a supervision problem that extends at least 2-3 levels above that manager.

[binaryanomaly]

I am in exact this situation as well and I did give notice. Thought we have left this era behind years ago, seems I was wrong.

[aezell]

I came here to make this exact point. I would further state that in tech businesses, tools shift, interests shift, and markets shift. Smart employees respond to that regardless of how amazing their manager might be.