[joelfried]

Personality differences are certainly a piece of it, sure.

But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.

[tmpX7dMeXU]

If only some people are doing “actual work”, why even have the others around? Why hasn’t everyone done their own thing? Are you telling me that with all these jeans and hoodie wearing teeny boppers starting startups that go big, the people that aren’t doing the “actual work” have somehow managed to slide in despite bringing nothing to the table?

Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s more likely that you have a pretty self-centred view of what “real work” is.

[willcipriano]

From the Havard Business Review:

> Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year

> More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.

https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...

[unforeseen9991]

Bullshit jobs continue to grow, especially as productivity increases. I can see the gap widening quickly as more and more automation comes from the AI progress boom.

[joelfried]

If my use of "actual work" offends you so greatly, you can replace "people doing actual work" with "people you manage" and my point stands.

Managing competing priorities and setting company-wide direction are certainly actual work - but regardless, that's pretty tangential to my real point about leadership.