So 48% would not mind being a middle manager? That’s a lot of middle management
That's my company!
Conscious unbossing
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: Conscious unbossing
#42I doubt this wasn’t also true for young millenials or genx or boomers. 20 year-olds don’t generally want to be middle managers.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#43[deleted]
Re: Conscious unbossing
#44Does anyone really aspire to be a middle manager? That's like the worst spot in the hierarchy
One meets people who are really trying to look important by having more reports than the other managers. People who use Linkedin, say “best practices” without irony, and like to tell stories about what programming was like 25 years ago when they were a junior engineer shipping Windows software. Then, mixed in with those folks, are a few people who are good at working with upper management, understand how the machine…
What's wrong with "best practices"? I get the feeling the best practices you're complaining about are TPS reports, whereas I'm thinking more like "don't ship to prod on Fridays".
Re: Conscious unbossing
#45A few more years, and Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 will be doing this job.
AIs will take over middle management simply because they're faster and have more bandwidth than humans. They don't have to be smarter, just better coordinated. As Patton once said, "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
Programs already run lower management. At Uber and Amazon, the computer is the foreman.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#46Without data about what previous generation said to exactly the same questions, at the same age, the conclusions comparing GenZ attitudes to those of prior generations are completely meaningless.
Maybe GenX youth and young Boomers before them also thought management was fuddy-duddy.
Hippies, hello?
It wasn't GenZ that produced the movie Office Space, The Office sitcom or Dilbert.
(Speaking of which, exposure to these kinds of cultural artifacts likely plays a role in the GenZ outlook.)
For as long as I can remember, corporate management has been ridiculed in popular culture. It's a set of common tropes.
A kindergarten kid saying they want to be a middle manager when they grow up can be predicted to be an instant howler.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the replies to GP sound like desperate attempts not to self-identify as a middle manager. GP's definition matches common usage: To people not invested in this game, if you are manager at a large company and not C-suite, you're a middle manager.
Obviously silly. There are obviously a large bulk of managers who do not manage other managers, and they could reasonably only be called simply "managers". What would be the excuse for adding "middle" to them when they are not in the middle of anything?
They are above the employees and below the C suite.
You probably could just call them "managers" with little loss of meaning. But the term "middle management" can connote a kind of useless that makes them different from "front line managers". The difference seems to depend on how useless your front line managers appear to be.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#48What percent of workers are middle managers? 10% or less I imagine…
I honestly think it's like 50%
Re: Conscious unbossing
#49In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers. Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers. Senior management never faces any…
Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck)…
My understanding is that all corporate positions above rank and file — and especially the C-levels — live in a meat grinder where the only viabile strat is "figure out how to kill competition on the corporate chaos/ladder before it kills you".
Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within, their customers, and even their investors reflect how they've treated people to get where they are already: exploit and discard.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#50In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers. Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers. Senior management never faces any…
I’ve worked at some companies with senior managers that were really good at training other managers and good at fixing problems at a department / org level. Rare, but it happens.