Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Being a Manager Sucks”.
Luke, what was the transition to a management type position like? I currently have two offers, one for exciting technical work and another for management which is very financially enticing. Take the exciting technical work, managing people sucks, yeah kind of that think about every like hole. You’Ve ever met in your life. Now imagine that you’re responsible for like dealing with their you also manage very nice people.
I do yeah like I am relatively sheltered. Yeah like we have an amazing company full of amazing people. If I had to, if I had to manage general population, I’d quit honestly yeah yeah, definitely like full stop it also.
It also like hyper depends on I’m sure, the company that you work at, like I I don’t mind doing it here, there’s places that I have worked or or I would not be willing. You know, like I don’t know, um. The reason why I said painful was because for me I had to realize, like all the ways I would have hated managing myself um, which was a bit of a painful experience, yeah little smug over there um cuz, he had to do it, get wrecked nerd um. So yeah that kind of sucked a little bit, but it was probably good for me as like a human to be honest, um, fair enough um but yeah the actual aspect of managing there’s, I don’t know, there’s a lot of negatives. You have to deal with everything if, if, if, in my opinion, you’re going to do it properly and not just be like dead weight and yada y y y, then uh should roll uphill right. So you’re going to be dealing with a lot of bad bad and not really that much good cuz most the good is going to be claimed by your team yeah. You should be crediting your team and then you should be taking responsibility when things go wrong. Yeah. So so, basically they do everything good. You do everything bad and that’s like I like it yeah, because it means I only have to yell at one person yeah.
Well, not I Taran, but whatever yeah um and that’s like in my opinion, that is more or less how you should do because and like that. That doesn’t mean you just do that infinitely like if, if there’s one person that just literally screws up 100 % of the time, then it’s it’s on you, you need to cycle that person out. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that person’s like an idiot or a loser or something they just might not be in the correct role for them, and sometimes it does maybe, but you know I’m trying to be nice um, so part of it is like if you keep Them in a position where they are constantly failing, you’re, not doing them a favor, it’s it’s actually bad for both sides and you need to help move this process along which can be very challenging because brutal, sometimes the business and the individuals have conflicting needs, and sometimes Um people don’t realize what is best for them necessarily and that doesn’t again that doesn’t mean they’re idiots. It doesn’t mean they’re losers, it just means.
Sometimes your nose is too close to something to see the bigger picture like it can be. People messy right, like uh, you know just managing AI llms would probably be easier, even with all the hallucinations um life is challenging like sometimes sometimes people can. Sometimes people can change really quickly for reasons that have nothing to do with work and it AR not even their fault right, life is messy, so life is life is messy and you spend like most of your life working or thinking about work. As far as I can tell um, with within within eight hours a week five days a week, setup with commute time and um like prepping for work time, whatever you want to call that y um, all all all the other things involved, uh with it, such a Huge percentage of your life is work, and you you see all this stuff going around these days, that is like um, oh, like everyone’s super anxious and the world’s on fire and all this kind of stuff. It’S like okay, well, um part of the the hidden part of being a manager is you’re. Now, like a the support structure for everyone on this team, because you’re, not just like the the way that I, when, when people that aren’t in our little circle kind of ask me what I do, I I try to just Define it as like. I just I basically I remove blocks.
I try to keep the team moving professional, uh, Jenga player, yeah block mover um. That can be distilled in a lot of ways, though, and sometimes that is not like. Oh you go on Trello you see, a task is blocked.
You follow it up. You make sure these people are communicating. You figure out how to do whatever that’s ideal. That is ideal yeah that part’s actually like kind of cool yeah. You know it’s not the most common version of it um and sometimes it can. It can be really taxing um to have your own stuff going on um and then need to help manage other people’s stuff as well. I don’t know some, sometimes it’s really rewarding. Sometimes it’s really taxing. Sometimes it’s really good. Sometimes it’s really bad.
It’S it’s like a. I don’t know it’s it’s a very interesting position. I think it’s been good for me as a human, but I don’t think it would be good for everyone. I’Ll say this: if you’re still really young, maybe do the fun technical position yeah. I I don’t know that. I would jump into managing people again yeah there yep that I can stand behind, but uh. There is a lot of career path to managing people because, honestly, a not of not a lot of people want to do it. But if you’re being offered that today, it is also possible that you will work your way there again, you’ll, very likely, be and and something that you could do.
If you want to stay on, the technical side is become like a technical lead for a small team and if you’re doing something, that’s really fun. That still seems cool to, and you have an aptitude for it possible that you will end up kicking so much butt that you will not only get offered some kind of supervisory or managerial position again, but maybe an even better one. I don’t know like I’m not familiar with your exact situation: yeah, you don’t have to jump now and everything’s everything’s a everything’s, a gamble right. You can never go back and take a path that you that you didn’t take um. So, just you know do your best with it have fun. There is either way a ton of bad managers and there’s a ton of companies that have a really really hard time filling managerial roles. So those roles will be there. .