a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3027 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year

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





kleinbl00  ·  3026 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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'.

zebra2  ·  3026 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    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.

That hits hard man. I've been spending a lot of time in Excel since finishing grad school.

kleinbl00  ·  3026 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.