chapotraphouse

Middle management is a scam and it hurts the soul.

You get a pay bump of, what 50 cents? A dollar or two? And for your trouble you get a whole lot more stress and you quickly find whatever pay increase you get is gobbled up because the buck stops with you and you are often stuck working back in crisis situations.

You also end up as the hatchet man, having to deliver whatever mahogany row decides would be the best way to squeeze customers or clients for dollars while making the work harder for employees, and often there's the expectation that you should resort to coercion and underhanded tactics.

Management roles are good if you want to do union organising, if you want to get dirt on the company (just a tip - those two are absolutely not mutually-exclusive btw), or if you have the right leadership skillset and you are critical to the function of the business such that you're able to swing your weight around and sorta gatekeep what the higher-ups think they're going to be able to impose on the staff or the team. But that takes a particular sort of person and it demands a lot of assertiveness, plus if you're not the kind of person who has a lot of credentials or industry contacts then you're probably going to bring down a whole lot of financial stress upon yourself when some higher-up takes a strong dislike to you and decides to fuck with you.

There are some reasonable management roles out there but those tend to be the exception to this rule imo.

I don’t mind being the senior member with more trust and responsibilities and power to manage people. But I would never take on the role of “manager.” Seems absolutely miserable unless your field is useless and you get paid to jerk off

I don’t want to deal with budgets or have back to back meetings about performance and departments and progress and all that shit. I’ve had to push back my own meetings with my managers like 4 times because their entire day was literally nothinf but meetings.

In hourly jobs, the manager/team lead will often be paid a salary. The managers I worked with were working from like 11 AM to 11 PM. No over tiime of course. It’s literally just more guaranteed work with less money lol

I've never been a manager at my place of paid employment, but I was a manager at a not-for-profit/volunteer organisation, and that alone was enough to turn me off it. I'm convinced most managers are like genies trying to get some sucker into the bottle to take their place (edit: and yeah essentially by the time I realised, that was what I was doing, trying to find someone to take the reins so I could dip)

Yep, after 5 years at the company and watching as the senior members jumped ship, I thought I could weasel the salary I deserved out of them by stepping up to the plate. Turns out I got the salary I should have had the whole time, but nothing extra considering I was managing 12 people. On top of that, I was also expected to make magic happen whenever the executives pulled their heads out of their asses long enough to realize there were problems. Needless to say, I didn’t finish my 6th year. I regret so many of the decisions I made in my career that year. I should have never showed interest in managing because I could have stayed in my current role and probably been a lifer doing a job I was good at. Instead I jumped ship to a different company that I like less, doing things that bore me to death. So my 2 cents is to stick to being a grunt and avoid the stress and self loathing that comes with being middle management… unless you are into that sort of thing, because many people love ladder climbing into positions they despise for the sake of “career advancement”.

I’ve never taken a leadership position because I’m not trying to be good enough at my job for anyone to ask if I would like to move up. Typically you’ll never get a raise to beat inflation anyways so it’s just better to do your year or two with a company and just look for another job after that and just ask for more money. Once you go management you’re tied at the hip to that company.

im in the position right now where im expecting every single person with more experience than me to retire any day and im straight up not going to take the manager position when they offer it to me lol

i mean ill consider it, ill ask what they pay. they'd have to pay me a lot to accept it though

Seems like you're making the right decision for you.

I tried a few times, many years ago, to get into a supervisor/manager job at a place where I'd been a worker bee for years. Always was told no, somebody outside the department was hired, then they'd quit after a few years.

A part of me was curious what it would have been like. A part of me also thinks that it probably wouldn't have gone well for me, I'm not the type of person who will challenge things in person, but if I'm told to do something very silly by people who aren't there to enforce that directive I'll just not do it.

This is exactly what management does when they think you're a pushover. The job is probably awful but they figure you'll take it and roll over for them and then they'll abuse you.

That is if they even give you the job in the first place. Sometimes they'll dangle management roles in front of employees too if they think it'll motivate you.