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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Fake news. Director level jobs are known to be the most cushy jobs out there. Doubly true if you work at a tech company.

- You sit in meetings all day with limited outputs. Sometimes you have to send or reply to a few emails at the end of the day. Hard.
- You are not on the hook to personally work on deliverables. You pass these on to people under you to handle and review at most. Hard.
- You are not truly responsible for vision and organizational strategy, which your VPs or C-Suite own. You are mostly implementing what is handed to you. Hard.

These are just the top three reasons this is a false dilemma. I could go on and on. 
[/quote]

I actually agree with this but I've also observed that some people get how to make these jobs work for them and some people don't. What I see a lot are directors who don't know how to delegate and micromanage those under them (making them miserable and ultimately driving away competent people who want to be trusted to do the jobs they know how to do). These people also often tend to struggle with decision-making even of things that aren't that important which greatly increases stress not only for them but for everyone around them as decisions bottle neck and they wait for someone else to figure it out or for the problem to go away.

If you are a decisive person who knows how to delegate and hold people accountable (and ideally have good hiring instincts and also a willingness to make tough choices when people under you are not delivering) then this can be a GREAT lifestyle job. It's a lot of meetings and there can be high expectations that you be present for a lot of stuff but most companies are fine with remote work and in tech in particular there is no stigma to doing things like working from a vacation home while working a flexible schedule that enables you to spend a lot of time with your kids. There are also annual rhythms to these jobs so you know when it's going to be busy and when it will be less so and once you figure this out you can structure family life around it to ensure plenty of time with kids AND that you aren't super stressed all the time.

But it seems many people who wind up in these roles lack the leadership skills (delegation and decisiveness in particular) that make it work. I've known so many miserable directors in the last 20 years. For some it's the worst job they'll ever have. They don't have the fundamental skills to do it.[/quote]

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