Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work.
The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply get the benefits.
- you manage managers of three teams globally with 6 employees each.
- you know that your best IC is about to go on parental leave
- three others are either leaving or moving to another team in the next year
- your european team’s manager is not meshing at all and there’s pressure from all directions to fix it
- after shuffling or firing the european manager (who you genuinely like personally,) you suddenly have 8 direct reports you need to meet with weekly and support
- new teams form with overlapping responsibilities and you have to create a relationship with that team and its leadership so no one steps on the other’s foot and there isn’t confusing ownership
- you hire a new european manager and now you have to fly overseas and train them, while at the same time handling issues for your home team and your own personal responsibilities
- in the middle of all this and while your schedule is peppered with interviews to conduct, some random high-visibility initiative with no owner and outside your area of expertise gets assigned to you.
I’ve seen directors suddenly get 30 new ICs three levels below them and have to somehow write their reviews. It ain’t all pretty.
People have babies, people change jobs, new hires don't work out. All of these things are known. You identified them as risks and planned accordingly, right?
> some random high-visibility initiative with no owner and outside your area of expertise gets assigned to you
Oh, I see.
> you suddenly have 8 direct reports you need to meet with weekly and support
You really, really don't need to meet each of them weekly. Not even necessarily monthly. Depending on the individual, some you might need to meet more than others, but the idea that you need to meet each one weekly is a self-imposed problem that of course robs you of at least a full work day, and past a certain scale requires more managers to handle. This is ignoring the content of the meetings, which if you get into make the case even worse for management, because so often a short email exchange or even a short Slack exchange suffice for what otherwise would have been 30 mins to an hour. (One of my managers was rather skilled at digging out of me over the course of our 1-on-1s some of the minor problems/issues I felt were present with the team/company that I otherwise wouldn't have brought up in an email/IM (and if I did not more than once), but given that they never changed or went away in 6 years, and that I had already made peace with them, what was the point?)
Same thing with conducting a ton of interviews -- delegate to ICs of the team the candidate is likely to join! It's your own doing that you insist on having a screening chat with every candidate, or that you have this many candidates you're considering at once, or that you hire into a general "pool" where team selection/assignment happens later.
Same thing with the needing to suddenly write the reviews for 30 people -- the need for those reviews is entirely a self-imposed problem, and could be done away with or altered. (e.g. relying on ICs reviewing each other, or using objective metrics, or having an easier firing process than long PIP dramas, or just bumping everyone's pay regardless to keep up with inflation, or...)
Unfortunately system problems can typically only be done away with (rather than 'solved' with management work / more management) by someone at a higher level than you, whose higher role is in part supported by the problems existing in the first place.
Somebody needs to. It's important to put in the time building relationships so that people are comfortable coming to you with concerns and so that you can recognize their patterns and notice when there's something they're not telling you.
An upper level management job can be very stressful. You have very little visibility into progress or issues, but are responsible for setting direction and making decisions with many consequences. If you get involved, you’re called a micromanager. If you don’t, you’re out of touch.
Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down. You spend all your time debugging the mess of an organization, not on the things that brought you to the industry.
It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying to claim it’s harder, or that the pay is proportionate or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true from what I have seen.
I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors are different.
Management is responsible for the organization, hence why comments about how hard it is to deal with a messy organization tend to fall on unsympathetic ears.
I'm saying managers justifying how important and difficult their jobs are by pointing to all the organizational debt they deal with are missing the point.
A shocking number of managers don't even manage. They just run around putting out fires caused by a lack of management. Organizations can get stuck in this mode and it's really hard to pull them out of it, for sure, but just because someone's navigating a stressful and dysfunctional organization doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a great job at management.
>Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
The daily work of a senior leader is mostly communication, alignment, and politics (i.e., resource allocation). From the outside (and sometimes the inside!) this looks like "lots of bullshit meetings." Coasting at this level simply means that your priorities aren't fulfilled, your initiatives fail, you're cut out of important decisions.
When you're an IC, you have no idea what your manager does. You have even less of an idea of what your manager's manager does.
I know I was naive about direct management until I tried it and realized just how much they do that I never was aware of. And as I became a more senior IC, now working directly with senior managers (managers of mangers), I found out just how much they're involved with.
At high-intensity high-output companies (including gaming ones), it's very rare that senior managers end up just resting on their laurels and letting the line managers do all the work.
First of all, it's an all-encompassing job. You are effectively oncall for various escalations, personnel issues, priority/project issues, conflicting incentives - you are responsible for all the people underneath you, and all the conflicts that might occur that direct managers don't handle - they escalate to you. At that level, there is no expectation of work-life balance, you might get called in the evening/weekend to deal with something. While you're detached from the depth, you are responsible for way more breadth.
Secondly, line managers are still expected to be primarily focused on their technical projects and their people. Senior managers have to start dealing with Legal, Marketing, Sales, Facilities, office issues, christmas party organization, press release, etc. Sure, some of it is just coordination and delegation, but the point is that you have to organize all sorts of disparate considerations that frankly are not in technical people's forte. This arguably becomes 50% or more of the job, and this is where things get really tough. Do you want someone technical for this that will be MISERABLE spending time on 50% of their job, and not doing an amazing job at it? Or do you want some MBA type that will be great, but then have no credibility with their team, no ability to influence the techncial direction, because their people will sniff out their technical weaknesses and not respect them for it.
Naturally none of this is universal. There are exceptions of exactly what you're imagining - someone that just steps back, lets everyone else do the work, and they aggregate/summarize and take all the credit. But I don't think those are actually the majority.
Amusing to see this attitude on HN in the 21st century. Have not the last 20 years of startup successes having very technical founders successfully transition to more managerial roles more than demonstrated otherwise?
There is also a big difference between doing these things as the CEO of a 100-person startup, where every choice you make is a reflection of you, a reflection of the culture you're setting up, and contribute to the legacy that YOUR company will have, vs as the Sr. Manger of a 100-person org in a huge company, where ultimately it's not your company.