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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Middle management is brutal. No one gives a shit and you have very little power.
Middle Manglement. Don't forget they have to put their stink on everything to differentiate themselves.
It's one of the main reasons ideas that do actually work at a c-suite level end up being implemented terribly in the end.
My favorite part of working at a call center was watching this happen. A c-suite member would ask why we weren't doing X, middle management would scramble to make it happen instead of saying there's a good reason for it, then the c-suite member would show back up 6 months later asking why the hell they were doing something stupid.
But at the same time nothing is really expected of you - by the people above or below you. And you make more money than the people doing the actual work.
Maybe where you work
Ageeed I'll never do it again.
Middle management deserves everything it gets.
Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)
I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?
The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I'm mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.
My point to all of this - "middle manager" is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of "middle manager" hoping they'll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.
In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.
So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn't do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired "career managers" whose only skill was to organise things?
I'm obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don't have much time for that and there's no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I've usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.
What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.
I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I've worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I've ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn't really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.
It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn't harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.
My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn't stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples' mouths all day long. I don't think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.
Beg to differ. I work in healthcare and we just got a new manager for our 2 teams (web dev and interfaces) and she has very little technical knowledge. It’s embarrassing the amount of times I’ve literally had to explain the difference between GitHub and VSCode (yes, I know they aren’t even remotely the same thing). Morale is super low. I assume she was hired because she was a “good middle manager,” but I fail to see how that’s possible.
If you take a job shoveling shit, am I supposed to feel bad for you when you shovel shit?
They're fucking climbers. Every middle manager takes the job because they want to be upper management someday. Zero sympathy.
I'm gonna make what I consider to be an important distinction here, but I also want to say I mostly agree with you and I'm bummed by the downvotes.
I think we can lump the middle manager into two broad "types". And you seem to be exclusively describing one of the two types - the one that's, frankly, smart and "aware" enough to realize that middle management is trash, rank and file is trash, and they know precisely why they are aiming to get above everyone. It ain't cuz they want to help, of course, and they never intend to. Fuck those people every possible way, because not only do they understand that the purpose of middle management is to be the buffer between the owners and the laborers, they also have decided - with full awareness! - fuck the laborers, I want to be good with the owners.
But there's another, sadder kind of middle manager, and I think maybe your hostility is unkind and unfair to this type. This middle manager still has the wool pulled over their eyes, they really think if they work hard and do well, they'll be rewarded! And hey, isn't the fact that they've been promoted (!) to leadership a clear indicator that they're doing things right? Just gotta keep at it, the really important people keep telling me this is what they like to see, I'll finally be able to get all these bills paid / improve my life! I'm on the way up, finally.
And then that person says "YEESH managing this store is really hard, I've gotta get better at this. My leadership doesn't seem to think this should be a struggle..."
Etc., etc., for 10, 20 years as the wool gradually falls from their eyes. Not everyone is able to see things as clearly as you are. Most middle managers, I think, are basically suckers. Naive and exploited. The rest, tho, are basically monsters without enough power to be monsters. No argument there, and fuck those people.
3rd type- sees Real wages falling each year, has college debt or car debt or credit card debt or had to buy a new furnace on an installment plan or God forbid wants to take a vacation or or or
Anyway, this person has to try keep climbing or they will lose their car/ be kicked out of their apartment, nothing in society will support them as they "failed at their job and/or must be lazy", etc.
There truly are some doofuses at every level of organization, the closer to the top people more often are playing the cruel game to win, but middle management are hardly the game theory types--they wouldn't have accepted their job if they were that strategic as there is no winning.
So depressing to see working class folks going after other working class folks(someone with supervisor or manager or director in their title) because they "have it better"...the latter almost exclusively are trapped in a different fucked up system.
I have some sympathy for people who have completely internalized the logic of capitalism and don't even realize the role they play in our own oppression, but that sympathy only goes so far. After a certain point all I have left is contempt. They're bourgeoisified by their position within the labor force, in my view it doesn't matter what their intent is. In reality, many of them are just doing their jobs and they aren't ruthless climber psychopaths. The problem is that their jobs are inherently tied into a broader system of capitalist oppression.
I'm gonna assume you don't know any better. Not saying there aren't bad or stupid middle managers, but usually the middle manager is the person who got shoved into a "management" position they probably didn't want, and all they really get to do is take all the heat when decisions they didn't make blow up in their face. It also usually comes with false promises of raises but upper management never really intends on giving it.
It's like, top level squeezing the bottom out 101.
I'm pretty fucking sure you still have to apply to become a middle manager. You don't just evolve like a Pokemon.
They voluntarily became the manager's gofers because they're disgusting climbers and they get what they deserve. 🙂
I'm pretty fucking sure it doesn't work like that outside of your black and white interpretation.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying a lot of people find themselves in that (bad) situation either outside their control, or they can be manipulated, coerced, pressured, or hell use your imagination.
To be clear, it's definitely not always "oh so-and-so was so obsessed with climbing the ladder that they became the bosses bitch, Oooo." Thats a kindergarden take and, IMO, helps empower people at the top hoarding all the wealth.
Managers at every level exist to protect the boss's wealth and extract the surplus value we create with our labor. They're slave drivers for the wage slaves.
News flash: managers at every level also think of themselves as victims and they always pass that on down the chain of command. Upper management gets screamed at by senior management, then they scream at middle management, and then the people on the ground get screamed at. Shit rolls down hill. They aren't always looking to get promoted all the way to the top, but every single one of them wants to be promoted higher than the rest of us so they can get a little more of the surplus value we generate.
If their job as middle management is so fucking hard how about they give it up? Accept a demotion and rejoin us on the floor. No one has to be middle management.
A lot of us here work in software. Often times there are two tracks, IC and people management. Often times both of those tracks pay similarly.
The good people managers and directors are usually folk that were identified as being good at mentoring people and good at providing air cover so people could do good work.
I’m sorry you’ve never worked at a place with good middle management. It does exist in many places, and many people selected it because they like working with the people and the strategy more than the product directly. Often times these people could’ve been paid comparably by working as a staff or principal track engineer or experience designer.
The people managers are identified as the ones that can control and discipline the workforce to maximize their exploitation.
Whether they're nice about it or they just really like their job as a slave driver doesn't really change what their job is. Their job is to be the enforcers for upper management and this grants them a different class position.
I say this as someone who has worked for small companies, large companies, NGOs, and non-hierarchical collectives.
When you start working on something that is complex, and has a lot of moving parts, you need conductors. If you’ve got a better real-world example of an organizational model that works, I’m all ears.
Even in Leninist Russia, workplace structures had people managers in place to facilitate planning and to ensure that a team was aligned and set up to successfully accomplish a goal.
I’ve only ever seen one org structure that didn’t need some sort of people facilitation layer. And that was a tiny commune that a buddy of mine lived on. And everyone knew each other for years before they established said commune.
I'm not opposed to hierarchical organizational structures?
Under capitalism, the job of every single manager is to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible. That's their actual economic function. The problem isn't the organizational model, the problem is the larger economic system they exist within.
If you had some kind of horizontal non-hierarchical collective under capitalism all that could do is turn everyone inside of it into petite-managers and force them to exploit themselves in order to hit productivity quotas. Or, more likely, it would fail because people don't want to do that shit to themselves and need to be used and abused by a manager to make capitalism function.
K.
All I can say is that for many of us in people management here,
a) we could’ve paid our mortgage just as comparably on an IC track, and we do this job because we enjoy working with people and roadmap strategy, and
b) I don’t care whether you’re building a fintech bro trading app, public housing in the USSR, or are conducting an orchestra. You get enough people in one place trying to achieve a shared goal, and you need people to manage the people. Otherwise the work becomes messy and miserable.
You don't work with people, not really. You manage them. Your job is to strategically use them for maximum productivity; workers might be allowed some small amount of input but only as long as it can be fit within your "roadmap strategy". Your job it to discipline the workers and keep them on task. And, of course, make sure they never unionize.
These problems are structural. I don't care what your motivations are, your class position is as an underling enforcer for the boss and you're bourgeoisified by your position within the class structure. A manager, within this specific class structure, has every incentive to be an enemy of the workers. An individual manager can choose to become a class traitor, and people in management can be extremely powerful union organizers! But it rarely happens because it requires they betray their own class interests. It's structural.
I feel like all of your knowledge about “middle management” is derived from The Office.
I work for a living honey. My knowledge is derived from dealing with them.