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How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

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Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#31

Anecdotally, the idea of a career is dying among many I know. People just want the money. So some of it is probably being Overemployed. I have a job where I am just doing the minimum to keep it. Some of it is just waiting to be fired while their build their own businesses.

> People just want the money. I cannot imagine doing a job just for the money myself; I rather sleep under a bridge (probably not really but luckily I don’t have that issue). I just cannot belief it’s true; people here whine about tech all the time and updating to the latest stuff etc while you can make 250-350/hr doing CRUD in Java + Oracle in enterprises with knowledge you hardly have to update for the past two dec…

So somebody is going to pay 250$/hr for a job requiring only stale public knowledge? Why hasn't it been outsourced yet?

If I only cared about money, I'd probably just make drugs :)

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#32

Oh, man, I was hoping this thread would be about managers who have mastered the art of time management and are doing their jobs in a few hours per week. One of my old managers had it. I would rarely see the dude -- except for once or twice a month, when we'd happen to be in the same meeting. He'd wait until the last bit of the meeting, and then he'd come in -- calm and measured -- with a comment that would blow every…

I'm not sure if I qualify here, but I typically work just a few hours a week. I travel with my family most of the year, renting ABB after ABB for months at a time, and not for work. I also have a permanent home that I don't rent out. I'm an official employee and collect a biweekly salary. A handful of people report to me. Some have the same freedom I have. All have access to me for questions and guidance any time they want. I occasionally check in with them, maybe once or twice a month, just to see how they are feeling. They rarely need help with something. When I'm in town we hang out. I occasionally have calls with execs for meetings, not usually more than 4-6 times a year. If you're asking how I did this, here it is:

I started by automating systems in my department. This bought me a lot of time. I was down to around 15-30 hours a week. If my phone rang, I saw it as an opportunity to eliminate future phone calls by fixing or automating whatever caused the call. If it was something that required manual effort, I made it a one click procedure for whoever called me. They'd rather push a button than pick up the phone. After a couple of years, I was only working 10 hours a week. I still wanted more freedom, and I was bored. I thought about taking a second job, but I realized I was worth more to myself than the money of another job. I wanted time. This is critical. Realizing that I want time, not money, caused me to focus on the right thing.

I invited people who had no jobs and no skills to my house and spent the next two years training them to automate systems. I did this for free. Typically one and sometimes two at a time. We all became friends. When someone was good enough, I hired them. If I got push back from my superiors about why we needed to hire, I would ask, "Do we want this to be as smooth as the last thing I did?" Some people quit part way through learning. This was frustrating, but it's a price you have to pay to get really really good people who trust you.

The handful who stayed earn better than average full time salaries, work 10 hours a week most weeks, sometimes none at all, and maybe a couple of weeks a year they buckle down to rebuild something, or change something for a customer. They don't carry second jobs.

The last part is also very important. If you or your team carries a second job, then you don't care enough about the importance of free time to invest a ton of time when it matters to meticulously automate the shit out of everything, down to the finest detail.

There is almost nothing to call my department about. Everything almost runs itself, including my people, and their people.

Culture is key. I don't run the company, but I run the culture in my little corner of it. It's a culture of making time, not money. And, not just for ourselves, for others. When we make time for other people they don't have any reason to care when we are "AWOL."

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#33
I had a manager who I didn't see (digitally or in person) for 3 months at a stretch, and he was one of the best I ever had.

Small company that used to be bigger and we needed to finalize a migration that'd been in progress for like 7 years. It kept being delayed by leadership who'd get distracted, so the final 20% would never get done, we'd build more tech debt, and then the 20% turned into 23%. We'd argue to pay down the debt, get 1.5 weeks to tackle it, get it down to 20% remaining again and then delay for another couple months. Repeat this for years and you have a treading water situation for years.

This manager got hired, saw this was holding the company back (spend too high since 2 systems of infra and 2 places to wrangle features) and lobbied hard to finish it off. Said it'll take 7 months but we'd cut our spend by like 30%. Leadership agreed. Manager kicked off the project and then just disappeared.

Leadership then got distracted and wanted new things. Manager would re-appear for discussions EXCLUSIVELY with leadership, convince them to stay the course, and then disappear again. This happened repeatedly, probably every couple weeks, but he only interacted with leadership, firewalling us from them.

This manager had probably 3 meetings total with us the team over the course of the project because he trusted us to carry it out. Each meeting was him saying, "it looks like you're all making great progress, let's keep it that way." Then disappear again.

We had two of those meetings after the start meeting, and the final meeting at month 7 was "hooray, you did it, everything's implemented, all traffic's migrated, all error rates are well within tolerances, and we've turned off the old machines, saving us loads of money. Congratulations! Here's a nice gift and a bonus, let's celebrate!"

We did, and then not long after he left for greener pastures. Leadership loved him, the team loves him, but he saw his time had come. Love you Ahti, you were probably the best manager I ever had!

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree somewhat, but we were talking about maximising money without caring about the work; that, at least to me, means I am working as a company for a company, not in a traditional job. Contracting as a company means I can deduct almost everything I buy and/or charge it to the client which means more money. It also means multiple clients and work from ‘my office’ (which looks a lot like my home) has been allowed for…

Yes, I was talking from the POV of employee. If I am going through the trouble of setting my own company and doing contracting job which involve similar work, then to maximize money for work, I would be thinking of offering some SaaS service via the company. If so many companies want a similar thing, then there is some gap in the market.

Different budgets (in a lot of companies they don't have to do paperwork for a project that fits in the assigned budget, but monthly contracts have to be improved higher up and with the IT dep etc) and one doesn’t exclude the other; once I built it for that company I can recreate it and try to sell if I believe it's worth it. My first SaaS company actually was created (in 2001) when one of my enterprise clients said I was allowed to not only sell the solution we built for them but they would actually encourage their competitors to use it so they get new features without having to start a new project themselves. But we kept selling custom/from scratch implementations as well because some companies simply want to own things. The company still exists and sells the same product (very much changed over the years). Was built in Java.

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#36
Stop pretending that companies care if you spend 40 hours or if you do 80% of the work. The majority of the time they look at you as a cost per unit and make decisions based on that.

I just saw the best lead java developers be laid off after 20 years with the product because he was overpaid salary wise when compared to 10 other contractors from India. All that tribal knowledge is gone and never coming back. Mind you this person could run laps around all 10 of these contractors but corporate America only cares about vanity metrics and looks at employees as cogs in a machine.

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#37

I had a boss once who was hoarding projects to manage - he wanted to have fingers in all possible pies. As a result, he basically spent most of his time in transit between meetings (not even in the meetings themselves...). If it sounds great, it wasn't. He was notionally in charge of ~50 projects or so and a blocker on each one. Nothing definitive could be done without his approval, which was hard, as he wasn't even…

I’m not suggesting he was one, but there’s a version of this person where they not only do this but they’re also incompetent. Since upper management has even less domain-specific knowledge than this hypothetical person, they appear extraordinarily productive because of their calendars and workloads. I watched one systematically eliminate good people using this method by laundering accountability to them for things that were totally out of their control. If you ever encounter this person, my advice is to leave the company ASAP.

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#38
post #4

AWOL as in they don't come in at all, or AWOL as in they don't produce any noticeable artifacts or effect on your personal or team output? I manage a team and we have a return to office policy that I'm waiting to be reprimanded for not following before I actually come in, but I also don't hold my people to any standard beyond what I'm willing to do. I couldn't imagine ordering them to go in and not doing so myself.

I only mean AWOL in that they aren't available/online/in-office. So just cashing paychecks without actually doing anything.

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#39
post #17
post #14

Why would I care about my manager not being in the office? We probably don't share a continent anyway. On the other hand, sometimes it is culture. I had manager that had 100+ direct reports. He never had 1x1 and barely managed to get all of the payrol/timesheet/pto aprovals on time.

> Why would I care about my manager not being in the office? I suspect OP might be more interested in the manager being available, not so much where the manager is physically located.

Correct, I myself am fully remote.

Re: How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

#40

Yeah I’ve seen that before many times and usually they’re moonlighting. So it’s not career immolation necessarily, it’s more like double dipping.

I suppose this makes more sense, though I feel like if they'd put in even a partial effort they could've dragged it out much longer than they did. Boom, FAANG wages at boring mid-west companies.
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