never worked somewhere that directors are considered middle management.
I’ve been at places where there was Associate Manager, Manager, Sr Manager, Group Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP, SVP.
That is insane imo. Anyone below director is useless, and the director should just report to the VP or CTO.
My point is that managers should be rare. And teams should be small.
I’m not taking career or technical advice from an associate/manager because they’re usually the worst ICs and overall lowest performers in like 80% or more of the time. This is how they struggle to stay in the game. You have probably heard many people who are the best IC say they don’t want to manage.
They then get managed by the worst people. And they just leave like that when they can’t take their managers BS anymore.
You ever gotten feedback like “you need to speak more in meetings” from one of these low tier managers? All they do is waste everyone’s time in useless meetings. I’m there to work, not pretend I’m smart by making dumb diagrams and writing/sharing 20 page documents on things that have nothing to do with the job. You see these people come out of the woodwork during late stage. And that’s when most of the beat engineers leave and you have commodity tier folks running the show.
It’s just facts. I’m giving my perspective. And it’s frustrating that I have to keep changing jobs because management is always the weak link. People missing deadlines, people putting effort into things that don’t matter, just talking/wasting time.