Comment by mancerayder
4 hours ago
You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing architecture reviews, and getting slammed with meetings.
Please tell me where these 'managers make a lot of money and do nothing but approve timesheets' companies are, I'd kill to work for one!
Nobody is blaming the middle or frontline managers here. Those people are driven and genuinely want to do a good job
But what we are saying here is that they are essentially an artificial layer of busywork that adds very little value. This is what decades of empire building and organizational issues have created.
It's slowly changing and people are realizing a lot of the manager work is self-created and sustained.
My prediction is that most tech companies will go through flattening cycles now that we start realizing that adding managers adds a similar amount of busywork.
I was a technical team lead/line manager and I watched my team casually ask about what I did all day and then 10 minutes later call me up to spend an hour debugging their code for them. And then the next one called me up to work on theirs... :-)
On the other hand I've had managers just the same - cannot understand why anything is difficult and certainly wouldn't waste their time trying to help you.
It's just people, they're sympathetic or not. Determined or not. They care about the outcome for more than themselves or not.
You're describing frontline management, not middle management. My 2 cents is that frontline management is the worst job in engineering, for the reasons you describe and more.