| The reason I had for being a manager was to be able to get the work done without the idiocy I'd had to deal with earlier in my career. Up to a point this worked, but when I didn't program I started to become part of the problem and when I did, I didn't have time for the management. The politics are horrendous and just to survive you try to bend just enough with the prevailing wind not to get into trouble but then you find you're becoming "the man" to your team. If you're too nice they start thinking "what does he even do?" - well all the boring stuff that lets them off the hook so they can focus. Then you realise that problems with arseholes that used to come from above and from the side can now come from below as well and, unless you're in some capitalist fantasyland, there are only slow painful and expensive solutions which damage you. You also get to see that you're not allowed to do the things that would let your team achieve goals but you are definitely going to be blamed for all the ridiculous ideas your superiors try to force on you when they finally escape through promotion and you're left trying to explain why X and Y were done. So in general I feel burned out about people after my experience. I completed projects on time in the face of lots of problems which I managed to navigate around effectively but the experience was horrible because people are often horrible and horribleness wasn't some thing you could admire - like "oh they're tough but effective." It was more like stupidity all the way through but made up for by arse kissing. In every place there's stupidity all over the place. At one place people know all about how to use source control as if that was too unimportant to mention but have no testing system for all their macro-services so everything's always breaking .... but of course we can't delay those new features just because of the latest incident can we? At another I'm getting lectured on how to do everything by the git expert of 3 months while I convert their incredible SCCS system. At another, man,we have 100 commandline arguments and our customers just better learn them all to get an optimal result. All of them screw up agile and bitch about why it isn't doing what they thought it would. The new thing is checking up on your AI usage to make sure you're using it enough. Lets not fix our development and testing process ... no ... lets hope AI will magic our quality problems away! Being a manager doesn't really let you fix this stuff. Firstly you have to be able to articulate why things are going wrong and that's bloody hard. Then you hit the problem that if you have amazing insight that lets you see what to do, nobody else at that company has it and they're all off following their own ideas no matter how little they might have worked in the past. Whatever is wrong is that way because the sort of social situation that came into existence formed it that way. You're not battling a lack of insight but something else - perhaps a set of incentives. Whatever it is, it's like trying to stop a hurricane by holding up your hands. If you're too low the higher management force you to be sht and if you're higher I imagine that the pressures of the business force you down the road of being sht anyhow. Accountants want software to depreciate - so it has to be "finished." So they hate you going back to fix things that are supposed to be "finished" and want you to work on new things. ..........ok, end of stream of consciousness. :-) I just feel a bit battered by it at the moment. Nothing in life is easy. |