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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Middle management is brutal. No one gives a shit and you have very little power.
Middle management deserves everything it gets.
Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)
I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?
The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I'm mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.
My point to all of this - "middle manager" is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of "middle manager" hoping they'll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.
In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.
So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn't do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired "career managers" whose only skill was to organise things?
I'm obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don't have much time for that and there's no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I've usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.
What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.
I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I've worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I've ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn't really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.
It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn't harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.
My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn't stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples' mouths all day long. I don't think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.
Beg to differ. I work in healthcare and we just got a new manager for our 2 teams (web dev and interfaces) and she has very little technical knowledge. It’s embarrassing the amount of times I’ve literally had to explain the difference between GitHub and VSCode (yes, I know they aren’t even remotely the same thing). Morale is super low. I assume she was hired because she was a “good middle manager,” but I fail to see how that’s possible.
If you take a job shoveling shit, am I supposed to feel bad for you when you shovel shit?
They're fucking climbers. Every middle manager takes the job because they want to be upper management someday. Zero sympathy.
I'm gonna make what I consider to be an important distinction here, but I also want to say I mostly agree with you and I'm bummed by the downvotes.
I think we can lump the middle manager into two broad "types". And you seem to be exclusively describing one of the two types - the one that's, frankly, smart and "aware" enough to realize that middle management is trash, rank and file is trash, and they know precisely why they are aiming to get above everyone. It ain't cuz they want to help, of course, and they never intend to. Fuck those people every possible way, because not only do they understand that the purpose of middle management is to be the buffer between the owners and the laborers, they also have decided - with full awareness! - fuck the laborers, I want to be good with the owners.
But there's another, sadder kind of middle manager, and I think maybe your hostility is unkind and unfair to this type. This middle manager still has the wool pulled over their eyes, they really think if they work hard and do well, they'll be rewarded! And hey, isn't the fact that they've been promoted (!) to leadership a clear indicator that they're doing things right? Just gotta keep at it, the really important people keep telling me this is what they like to see, I'll finally be able to get all these bills paid / improve my life! I'm on the way up, finally.
And then that person says "YEESH managing this store is really hard, I've gotta get better at this. My leadership doesn't seem to think this should be a struggle..."
Etc., etc., for 10, 20 years as the wool gradually falls from their eyes. Not everyone is able to see things as clearly as you are. Most middle managers, I think, are basically suckers. Naive and exploited. The rest, tho, are basically monsters without enough power to be monsters. No argument there, and fuck those people.
3rd type- sees Real wages falling each year, has college debt or car debt or credit card debt or had to buy a new furnace on an installment plan or God forbid wants to take a vacation or or or
Anyway, this person has to try keep climbing or they will lose their car/ be kicked out of their apartment, nothing in society will support them as they "failed at their job and/or must be lazy", etc.
There truly are some doofuses at every level of organization, the closer to the top people more often are playing the cruel game to win, but middle management are hardly the game theory types--they wouldn't have accepted their job if they were that strategic as there is no winning.
So depressing to see working class folks going after other working class folks(someone with supervisor or manager or director in their title) because they "have it better"...the latter almost exclusively are trapped in a different fucked up system.
I have some sympathy for people who have completely internalized the logic of capitalism and don't even realize the role they play in our own oppression, but that sympathy only goes so far. After a certain point all I have left is contempt. They're bourgeoisified by their position within the labor force, in my view it doesn't matter what their intent is. In reality, many of them are just doing their jobs and they aren't ruthless climber psychopaths. The problem is that their jobs are inherently tied into a broader system of capitalist oppression.