Phrasing of these headlines matter:
48% of GenZ professionals want to be middle managers.
Conscious unbossing
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Conscious unbossing
#52In 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…
The most important managers are the ones that serve as an actual translation layer bridging the gap between corporate business speak and developers.
I’m reminded of a recent HN article talking about how bad abstractions are actually just indirection and complicate things whereas good abstractions hide complexity and make things neat and modular
Re: Conscious unbossing
#53Nobody wants to be a middle manager. I’d be concerned if anyone ever wanted to be a middle manager. If you’re not C level and somebody reports to you, you’re a middle manager though.
Everyone wants to be middle management. You get paid more and Senior or Staff level is no longer your terminal career level (and therefore pay potential) as it is for most IC. Your performance evaluation becomes more subjective and less quantifiable, allowing you to hide your mediocrity and put it on others. Even if you’re same level as your ICs and the pay is same, you still hold the power in the relationship. If you’re bad manager, all the ICs can do is provide upward feedback, and that too is only at some workplaces. If you’re a bad manager, you can still fire an IC for “poor performance” any time. If company/product does poorly, ICs usually see the consequences. If the company/product does well, the management gets the pat on the back.
Even though I despise middle management, that is the only path I see forward if I want to continue being employed once I’m in my 40s.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#54So 48% would not mind being a middle manager? That’s a lot of middle management
The more middle managers you have, the more middle managers you need to manage those middle managers.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#55Nobody wants to be a middle manager. I’d be concerned if anyone ever wanted to be a middle manager. If you’re not C level and somebody reports to you, you’re a middle manager though.
Typically “middle manager” means you’ve specifically got managers reporting to you - you’re a manager managing managers reporting to a manager: “middle manager”
not precisely true. the "line managers" reporting to a middle manager frequently do not have the word "manager" in their title, leaving middle managers as the lowest level of actual managers.
line managers are a bit like NCO's (sargeants, corporals, non-commissioned officers) in the military; they have experience doing to the thing that they people they oversee do. The officer they report to may not.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle manager is not a precise term so opinions on what is and is not a middle manager differ but in larger companies there are definitely senior managers and executive management.
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.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s more than a little like someone who isn’t invested in football calling everyone on defense a “defensive back”. Middle management is a term of art referring to a specific role that works quite differently from the more common first line managers. Insisting on it as a catch-all term accomplishes nothing but making things more confusing.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> I get the feeling the best practices you're complaining about are TPS reports,
I’m talking about the actual term “best practices”, and not the actual practices themselves. The term is an ineffective way to communicate something.
Managers and engineers alike should be able to explain what they do in terms that can be connected with concrete actions / concerns and understandable business goals. Terms like “best practices” are ineffective at doing that. Just like there are code smells, this is a “communication smell” and makes me suspicious that there are underlying problems or weaknesses in the speaker’s ability to communicate clearly. “Best practices” also implies some kind of independence of situation which is fictitious.
“This team doesn’t use best practices for deploying code” -> unclear.
“This team doesn’t use CI/CD, engineers spend too much time resolving merge conflicts, and we see too many regressions make it into production” -> clear. If you need to put it in a bullet point, you can say something like “improve velocity”, “ship fewer bugs”, or “less downtime”.
I’m a fan of ambiguous or unclear language, but “best practices” strikes an unfortunate balance of sounding like it means something but wasting your words saying not much at all.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#58This doesn't really relate to the question of middle management, but it's interesting to compare the Canadian and British versions of this article: https://www.robert-walters.ca/insights/news/blog/Concious-un... https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/insights/news/blog/conscious... They both have comments ostensibly from "Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North" and "Martin Fox, Managing Director of Robert Walters Can…
Oh, huh, good catch. More of their quotes are just theaurus-substitution rephrasings:
> Lucy concludes: “It’s clear mid-level management remains a lynchpin of any organisation, and to keep these roles filled employers need to innovate their strategies to make them more attractive ...
> Martin concludes: “It’s clear that mid-level management is a cornerstone of any organization. To fill these roles, employers will need to rethink their strategies to make them more appealing ...
And no by-line on the article - no actual human is claiming responsibility for writing this.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle manager is not a precise term so opinions on what is and is not a middle manager differ but in larger companies there are definitely senior managers and executive management.
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.
No, "middle" very clearly does not include front line managers, who do a very different job.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle manager is not a precise term so opinions on what is and is not a middle manager differ but in larger companies there are definitely senior managers and executive management.
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.
Haha take a look at my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42591805