Seen it innumerable times. Share your experience. SVP has a question in an email thread SVP tags CVP CVP tags Sr Director Sr Director tags Director Director tags Sr manager Sr Manager tags line manager Manager tags IC who is expected to do all the work and respond. In this corporate tree looks like only leaf nodes do the work. PS: Titles above may vary, length of this tagging chain may vary. My question- what do managers do?
Certainly this is one function of managers. It is not a coincidence that efficient search algorithms are structured as trees and organizations are also structured as trees. It is a means to efficiently allocate work. Your statement above also seems to imply or mischaracterize that for every IC there are 6 managers. In fact, for every manager there are likely to be 5-10 ICs. So of course work is getting done at the leaf nodes. There are ten times as many of them! Managers are responsible for ensuring efficient deployment of those leaf nodes to efficiently accomplish work. When you are an IC, you are asked to work at 100% productivity. When you are a manager, you are asked to work at 0% productivity yourself but get your 10 employees to each work at 110% productivity. Both roles are contributing the same in different ways.
At least in banks, every IC has at least 3 managers
In banks, janitors are called VP of sanitation
lol it’s easy to become a manager. Study mechanical or civil engineering ,become a manager and then Just keep asking status to your direct reports every 2-3 hours without really understanding the effort involved in it.. And managers are easily replaceable too !
My manager does not even know how to log into the app that we are working on 😂
using that logic, a foot soldier should be better off taking direct order of the commander in chief then.
It's an edge case that the CEO will be asking about something specific to your area in a company of tens of thousands of ICs
As someone who sits 1 node above, I can tell you some employees are terrible to manage - like they're terrible employees who simply don't work. Maybe has to do with quality of hiring, so it's not always on managers as you see in the meme.
Congrats on learning what delegation means, OP.
If you can find the responsible IC in 6 hops in a 100k person company, it sounds quite efficient. How can one person be expected to know what everyone else is doing in such a large company? It seems silly to you because you are the IC and you know what you and your peer ICs are working on. Managers manage people, maybe projects, mentor reports that need it, etc. It is true that in many companies they are underutilized. Especially if managers don’t need to be SME and are expected to be pure people managers.
True