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> Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are

100% of managers nodding as they read this

True, but my gut says that there is a selection bias of people reading comments on such an article and being in that 1%

Might just be in my head though.

Are you a manager by any chance?

No, but the article was dishing out quiet hard, so the worst offenders wouldn't have interacted further. At least that would've been my expectation

I recorded the first episode of a podcast to go with the blog today. It was literally while you were typing this. I made a joke (that is almost not a joke) about my N-2 rule.

You can say all N managers in any organization are bad apart from two of them. Of course, managers want to assert that they're the good one (and some of them actually are), but they can't if you say one person is good, because to claim that spot would be to throw all your colleagues under the bus. But if you assert that you're one of the two good ones, then they can all claim to be one of the good ones without upsetting a specific person.

This is obviously not how it works at all, but I was very proud of myself.

In the Air Force we used to get force stratified based on our peers in our performance reports. It would include things like “#1 of 15 Lts in the squadron”. Everyone had a ranking, but you only found out where you stood once a year when your performance review came out.

There was a saying that I think also applies here: “Everybody knows who #1 is, and everybody thinks they’re #2”.

I am a manager, definitely nodded my head and patted my own back.

> 100% of managers nodding as they read this

Made me laugh - but I think that's not quite fair.

1% of managers know they're useless and inefficient. Ironically, that puts them in the top 2%.

Yep the gulf between proper leadership and corporate managerialism was never more apparent to me than when I left the army and did an MBA.

Leaders are 'in the trenches', in a commercial environment this means they know their stuff, are putting themselves 'on the line' and are demonstrating the values and standards expected of those further down the ladder.

Corporate managers are more like administrators, they dispassionately work the system for their own benefits and pay lip service to the cares and concerns of those they're meant to be leading.

A corollary to what you put above, i.e your main point still holds: A quote attributed to Charles Bukowski here: The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Translates to a work place here is what happens: often when you offer competent people position of authority or power they don't take it or are extremely reluctant to take it.

I've seen it recently - a guy in extended family who is hardcore introvert to the point of being very annoying in family settings (yet leads a small team of devs) wanted a promotion and eventually got it.

He got overly stressed from all the extra responsibilities, and after few months asked to move back, while everybody told me he did fine job.

Here is the thing - he still wasn't ready/good fit even if at glance all seemed fine. Its not just raw skills that make you a good fit for such a role, its the whole package, and how you manage long term while not going crazy. He was simply too junior for that role, even if from whole palette of skills only confidence/'maturity' (lacking proper word here, non-native speaker) was lacking. That was enough.

He will get there eventually. No point pushing hard for position that somebody may even give it to you, if it eats you alive (he kept elevated salary though... multinational corps are often weird)

To be honest I don't think it's a lack of intelligence (although that can be the case). To get on the MBA you have to have reasonably high mental horsepower. It's more that in corporate machines, management are so far removed and abstracted from making things that they become administrators by default.

i.e. the core job becomes tweaking the money making machine. And because everything is so complex it's almost impossible for anyone to identify which tweaks are moving the needle. And so self promotion, displays of power and competence become the de-facto measure of competency. In other words, they become politicians.

"The purpose of the system, is what it does"

That doesn't mean that leadership isn't necessary, it just more often comes too little too late because everyone's been busy doing nothing important.

> To be honest I don't think it's a lack of intelligence (although that can be the case). To get on the MBA you have to have reasonably high mental horsepower. It's more that in corporate machines, management are so far removed and abstracted from making things that they become administrators by default.

Exactly. Let's not lazily tar the MBA degree itself and leave it at that: Lots of people have MBAs and aren't corporate tools. Heck, the guy sitting next to you in engineering may have an MBA. They aren't particularly rare, generally taking only 2 years to obtain, and they don't make you dumber when you graduate.

The problem is with corporate execs who are running things but are not subject matter experts in what they are running. An SVP of a tech company may know nothing about tech, having managed a soup company or an auto maker in his previous job. His so-called qualification is his ability to make business pronouncements/decisions in a vacuum from the actual technical realities and constraints of the company. They are "generic leadership" professionals. These are the people, in general, who are ruining things, and they don't necessarily hold diplomas that say "MBA" on them.

I would take it at a FAANG that actually compensates you for it but out here in the sticks of the rest of the world it just ain’t worth the stress and red tape crunches (like being forced to do scrum or forced to do unrealistic planning in a week for 13 weeks work)

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity"

The Second Coming by Yeats.

(Written in 1919, the year before Bukowski was born.)

Oh well, I'm sure that if you read text that goes back centuries, you will find similar thoughts.

I think the situation is very much more complicated than this in the sense there is not just one way to behave, the right way to behave is situational. Good wartime leaders might be bad peacetime leaders and so on etc.

Do you want high or low aggression? Guess what: it depends.

I do want to suggest an option I haven't seen before which is "what if it turns out that middle management is more automatable than everything everything else"? i.e, very broad status updates are scalable with ai and it turns out middle management isn't as needed in the future as it used to be.

You probably don't even need AI.

> I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative/management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work.

You need to read David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs".

The eye-opening part for me was that until recently I thought useless managers were simply people who wanted to help but maybe didn’t know how; that they actually tried to not get in your way but failed. Now I understand that I was completely wrong. Getting in your way, attaching their work to yours and feeding off of that is not an accident but a consistent, conscious method. Doing manager work is in many ways much easier than anything that requires creativity; not only you can schedule your work and stand by that schedule, but you also don’t have to deal with the psychological effects of failing something that you’re personally invested in. Ideally, society should differentiate between these two things and recognise that doing creative work (be it engineering, design, research, etc.) is harder and more taxing, and less predictable, and reward us accordingly. But in the country where I live (somewhere at the rich corners of Europe) there is this idea that everyone is just as important and should earn similar amounts of money, which has led to an insurmountable amount of administrative jobs and people who love them above everything else. It’s just a small leap from that to “you need to go through me first before you can do what you want”.

> doing creative work (be it engineering, design, research, etc.) is harder and more taxing

... for some people. and easier for others.

we need both, and there's a need for balance. (and you need more careful administration in some areas and you need a lot more creativity in others. we want Boeing to be careful, but it's madness that we need paperwork for internal remodeling, etc.)

You're better off than here in the US, then; here, administrators get paid significantly more than anyone doing work that is directly productive or creative, and generally to advance past a certain point in your career, you must move into administration.

>went through two instances of three-full-day versions of the author’s Monday meeting

Sometimes it takes more indoctrination than others to try and convince people that the social climbers who seek leadership positions above all else can be suitable for the job.

>Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug

The concept makes sense, with "leadership-seeking behavior" manifesting itself strongest in those who have the greatest (yea, bigliest) lack of natural leadership ability, and who need some kind of a "fix" to supplement this deficiency. Kind of analogous to the drug addict and their toxic drug-seeking behavior which is not only self-destructive but damaging to everyone involved in one way or another, whether apparent or hidden behind closed doors.

And once they've gotten their fix they still can't perform as well as ordinary people who don't need some kind of artificial aggrandizement.