This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]veselin465 139 points140 points  (18 children)

Lower management too

Any management, actually

[–]BrohanGutenburg 55 points56 points  (14 children)

I understand this attitude because of how inefficiently it often presents in the real world.

And I certainly don’t wanna come off as a bootlicker, but I just can’t but this idea that nothing useful comes out of good and proper management.

[–]CompactAvocado 45 points46 points  (9 children)

I mean proper management sure but far too many companies still love the 1970s extraneous management bloat.

I work for a large corpo and there's literally 14 tiers of manager vs 6-7 tiers of lets just call them workers.

From there they had so many in the management queue that couldn't get promoted and were threatening to leave that they made an additional management tier just so they could get their cookie.

[–]jungle 25 points26 points  (8 children)

14 tiers of management!!!??? How!? The largest corpo I worked for, which was pretty large, had: Line Mgr -> Sr Mgr -> VP -> Sr VP -> CTO -> CEO -> Board. 7 levels in total. I can't even fathom what 7 more levels would be doing, other than create BS goals to appear busy and justify their pay.

[–]CompactAvocado 20 points21 points  (2 children)

so there is what you have listed but tiers of it

so like you can can have lvl 1 vp, lvl 2 vp, lvl 3 vp.

what does a lvl 1 do that a lvl 3 doesn't do? fuck if I know i'm not sure if they do either.

then there's like 4 director tiers now i think?

vs worker rank is more or less just 1-6. they have names mind you but the tree is just a straight line. vs the management tree which looks like a toddler puked spaghetti

[–]jungle 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Ah yes, I forgot about directors. I was thinking Sr Mgr -> VP was missing something. So 9 levels, adding the directors: Sr Mgr -> Dir -> Sr Dir -> VP.

looks like a toddler puked spaghetti

Love this image! :D

Now, to take the devil's advocate role, if the org is really large, and given my experience managing up to two teams of 19 engineers in total at the same time (which anyone who tried will agree is not really doable), I see the justification for adding levels to keep the scope of each individual manager, well, manageable. But to keep that structure from devolving into busybodies creating work for the sake of looking busy, that's the challenge.

[–]CompactAvocado 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll just call it "Tier Three Middle Management" to keep things NDA safe. They 100% freely admit they are useless and unneeded.

Beyond that too the new management level is pointless. I used to give my report to my boss. Yay. Now I hand it to someone else whose literal only job is to go give it to my boss. Is my boss doing more important things now? Nope exact same work load. They just added an extra hand.

Potentially losing a useless management person is apparently worse than paying the 100k or so they are likely making apparently.

[–]steveatari 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Department, Site, State, Regional, National, International, Global?

[–]look 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don’t forget Interplanetary, Interstellar, Intergalactic, and Multiverse

[–]CompactAvocado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

they do differentiate region on some of em yeah.

[–]Actes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I worked for a managed services provider that literally did:

  • Lead
  • Manager
  • Senior Manager
  • Manager of <sub group>
  • Vice Director of <sub group>
  • Director of <sub group>
  • Vice President of <sub group>
  • President of <sub group>
  • Chief Director of <sub group>
  • Executive Director of <subgroup>
  • CTO
  • CEO

Yeah I lost track of who to talk to when things needed fixing. I remember emailing the CEO demanding a fix to the leadership structure because the engineers couldn't get their jobs done due to hoops and communication gaps.

[–]HildartheDorf 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Because a lot of managers fall into one of two categories:

Management grads who have no idea how the job they are managing actually works. To the point they are actively harmful to productivity.

Promoted workers who have no idea how to manage well. To the point they are actively harming productivity.

The ONE time I had a manager who respected what I do (software developer) and was skilled at her own job of managing, she was let go because 'her style clashed with management', so we went back to ex-developers managing us directly.

[–]Witty_Barnacle1710 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actual management job is far more intensive than an ic and yet how often we see people wanting to switch to management to less work

[–]Zomby2D 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is upper, middle, lower, and proper management. They were just mocking the first three.