the managers at my company don't really do anything except periodically sort the work everyone else has to do into new piles and hold meetings about it but i get paid way more than i should anyway so i probably shouldn't complain edit: today i took a sick day to watch rain
Here's the important takeaway, though: your managers are capable of doing much more than that, and with them doing something else you might get a chance to do everything you're being paid for. My father in law is a Ph. D biochemist. He's got a dozen patents related to diabetes. But for the past ten years he's been supervising technicians and auditing Excel macros. Publicly traded multinational employer. Just sayin'.
That hits hard man. I've been spending a lot of time in Excel since finishing grad school.My father in law is a Ph. D biochemist. He's got a dozen patents related to diabetes. But for the past ten years he's been supervising technicians and auditing Excel macros.
Hey, he does okay. For most of my wife's childhood they were hardscrabble survive-on-grants single-income peeps. Now he's a two-houses frequent-flyer kinda guy. There's money in nerd-herding. Less science, though. They've got a line of product that pulls in a couple million a year that they'll have to give up when he fully retires. There simply aren't any candidates with the depth of experience he's got to maintain it.
A few years ago I did a summer job at a community college's back office. I basically took over someone's full time job there for two months. After my first week there, the new manager started his job there too. The woman I worked with was always drowning in work answering hundreds of emails and a few dozen calls a day, while I never saw him do much besides strolling around, questioning / distracting colleagues and getting coffee. I'm sure there are enough managers that keep projects and business going, but I am also certain that there are many that are not really helping much. (Best part of that job was all the gossip that went around the office. 18-yo me was a confidant for, like, 4 different people gossiping about each other.)