I’ve been at my current job for 10 months now, manager who hired me was my manager at last job for like a year. He is pushing me to take a “team lead” job but ive always refused those in every other job ive been in. Seems like theyre always stressed, and like its not worth the headaches. Im very OCD about work and never call in, which my bosses see and are like “omg, youre such a good worker. Youd make a good boss right” which…no. Im super non confrontational and am terrible and social cues lmao.
Im happy just riding out where im at. I get good benefits, already paid well, and have no kids. Why tf add stress?
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 mean, mine would be like 4-5 dollars. Im working in a factory full of people.
But im at 25, no kids, dual income, in a low cost area in the midwest. Do I want to work way more stressed and ruin the relationship with co workers so I can make 28,29? Fuck that. Im good lol
There are plenty of people in the world who have faced serious consequences to their relationships and their physical health and mental wellbeing that are right behind you with that decision.
I have no doubt there would be tons of people who have one of those stress-induced autoimmune disorders who wish they could wind back the clock and say to themselves "You know what, a bit of extra cash would be nice but I'm not sure that taking on all that extra stress would do me any favours."
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
Yeah im a busy body, I HATE when theres down time at work, but I think its because im 30 and for 10 years every job ive had has been super high work load and pressure. Im ok with learning/ knowing more than my peers, im even ok with them asking me stuff. Its managing and also having to do the hard stuff (write ups, firings) that i want no part in
Same, I like being the tech lead but miss me with that manager shit
I don’t want to deal with budgets or have back to back meetings about performance and departments and progress
The optimal point is where you have the power over those things, not just the responsibility
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 could have written this exact post, down to most of the same numbers lol.
If you think you'll actually like management (which probably means a lot more meetings, reviewing other people's work and time sheets, and making high-level decisions instead of actually doing any of the work involved) (and also means taking the flak for any screw-ups your subordinates make, trying to implement new procedures in a desperate attempt to make things better but your underlings hate the changes and your bosses are never as impressed as you thought they'd be, and watching other people excel and grow and learn new things doing the stuff you probably got into your industry to do in the first place), then by all means go for it.
I fell for this trap a few times. I was desperate for the pay increase at the time, which go figure never feels like as much as it looked like on paper, but I still needed it anyways.
These days, I keep it very explicit with my bosses that I have no interest whatsoever in doing those roles any more. It might make me a slightly less attractive employee, and it might hamper my career growth to some extent, but it means I get to actually do the thing I've always wanted to do every single day, instead of getting sucked into a bullshit-conjuration position vaguely adjacent to that thing, and I am grateful every day for that.
Also the confrontation thing, yeah big time. Moving up means more crushing downwards, which feels bad no matter what. Either somebody genuinely fucked up, and it's some degree of your fault for not training them right or catching it sooner, or they really did what they thought was right (and may have actually been the right thing) but a customer is mad or your bosses are mad or another department is mad, and you have to discipline them anyways.
You also have to fire people, which is probably the worst interpersonal interaction you can ever have at work, let alone in most areas of life. Again sometimes it's fully justified, and it still sucks, but plenty of times it's something like a layoff where it's "nothing personal, just the bottom line ya know", or it's that the bosses decided that this person needs to be fired for some arbitrary reason you may not even agree with, but you still have to be the one to pull the trigger and ruin this person's day/year. Additionally, you usually can't talk about the reasons with anyone else, so you have to field questions from the rest of your team that are usually good and valid, but you have to explain the away with vague corpo-speak and can't really tell them what's up.
So ya know, if any of that sounds fun, I mean, get checked out, because yikes.
Congratulations, you have a conscience, and are therefore unsuited for management.
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.
why would management be tied to a company in a way that anyone else wasn't? especially at the low levels?
Because once you become a manager you feel like you’ve moved up, and realistically most people don’t want to feel like they’re going backwards so they push through it. You’re not going to get another management position unless you can prove experience, so you’re kinda tied to that place for maybe 3-5 years before you can even think of being a manager somewhere else. As a regular employee I can just say fuck this place and go find something else relatively easy because they all pay about the same anyways.
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.
