I'm a fed supervisor and it's not so bad. I don't care at all about my employees but I show empathy etc when needed and all I do is make sure the machine runs smoothly with little interruption. I have colleagues putting on weight and developing health issues by nitpicking employee work or going after middling performance causing them to fend off numerous grievances and EEO complaints. The way to get rid of your problem people is to foist them off on the overeager supervisors or send them off to dumping ground agencies like DHS. In sum, take care of yourself and then take care of your employees.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to learn how to manage your managers. Sounds like you are doing good job managing down.

This. First line managing is HARD because you're being squished from both directions. You're doing great with your people, though. Being kind and understanding and valuing work accomplished and not hours of a green dot in Teams is being a good manager. But it sucks taking the bullets from above for the team. I agree that your next professional step is learning to manage up.

But one silver lining is that there is a cultural shift in the way people manage now. Slow as it might be to start, I think (hope) that in the future, more upper management will be like OP.

Op here. I don’t see what I’m doing as being kind and understanding, I just do not give a shit. We hire well trained and well educated mid-career professionals. I don’t care about how ‘the juice is squeezed’. Squeeze that mfr and if you need resources lmk and we can make it better.

Actually, I think that's what makes a manager be able to successfully manage. I took a step back b/c a gave a shit too much about everything that was upsetting my employees and it eventually impacted my on health.

Yeah I wish you could tell when you're hiring who will need hand holding constantly and who the squeaky wheels are. I have a good employee, but he whines to me daily about coworkers not returning his emails or other trivial problems. I just had a long convo with him yesterday about how I am here for major problems, you need to figure out more than one way to get things done. And you need to be patient. People aren't going to return your emails in 24 hours.

I have always turned down offers for moving up into a manager role. I hate managing people. I kind of do it now from a technical standpoing, and I hate it. I have high expectations, and I'm impatient. If someone is a slow learner I get super annoyed. Clearly, I am not a people person.

The parts of managing that you mentioned are the easy parts. It's HARD when you have bad performers or people who are constantly pushing for more. It's always the bad performers who want to work remotely (and they've proven they can't be trusted), ask for bonuses, constantly ask for raises, try to take over the easiest work projects possible (when instead those should be spread out evenly). I wish I could just be straight up and honest with my employees- "why would you deserve a raise? You're my worst performer and I spend the vast majority of my time babysitting you. Please look elsewhere because you're going on probation soon."

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to learn how to manage your managers. Sounds like you are doing good job managing down.

This. First line managing is HARD because you're being squished from both directions. You're doing great with your people, though. Being kind and understanding and valuing work accomplished and not hours of a green dot in Teams is being a good manager. But it sucks taking the bullets from above for the team. I agree that your next professional step is learning to manage up.

But one silver lining is that there is a cultural shift in the way people manage now. Slow as it might be to start, I think (hope) that in the future, more upper management will be like OP.

Op here. I don’t see what I’m doing as being kind and understanding, I just do not give a shit. We hire well trained and well educated mid-career professionals. I don’t care about how ‘the juice is squeezed’. Squeeze that mfr and if you need resources lmk and we can make it better.

Actually, I think that's what makes a manager be able to successfully manage. I took a step back b/c a gave a shit too much about everything that was upsetting my employees and it eventually impacted my on health.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to learn how to manage your managers. Sounds like you are doing good job managing down.

This. First line managing is HARD because you're being squished from both directions. You're doing great with your people, though. Being kind and understanding and valuing work accomplished and not hours of a green dot in Teams is being a good manager. But it sucks taking the bullets from above for the team. I agree that your next professional step is learning to manage up.

But one silver lining is that there is a cultural shift in the way people manage now. Slow as it might be to start, I think (hope) that in the future, more upper management will be like OP.

Op here. I don’t see what I’m doing as being kind and understanding, I just do not give a shit. We hire well trained and well educated mid-career professionals. I don’t care about how ‘the juice is squeezed’. Squeeze that mfr and if you need resources lmk and we can make it better.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t like prodding into their lives, the uncomfortableness when someone has to ask if they can log off early to tend to a sick child (I have never ever said no) and upper management hounding me about butts in chairs

I don’t want to play the game. If my folks get their work done on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, I could not care less. I approve all training requests, all pto, all ‘hey I’ll be late’ Texts. I genuinely don’t want to be a manager but it seems as I move up I’ll jus Thrace to ‘play the game’ more.

Managing staff is a skill, managing up is also a skill. Sounds like you need to learn how to get your boss+ to focus on results rather than how the sausage is made. Unless you're a Fed. Poking into the sausage making is part of a senior managers job else the OIG comes-a-calling.

just want to say, I'm struggling too. Middle management is thankless

Anonymous wrote:You need to learn how to manage your managers. Sounds like you are doing good job managing down.

This. First line managing is HARD because you're being squished from both directions. You're doing great with your people, though. Being kind and understanding and valuing work accomplished and not hours of a green dot in Teams is being a good manager. But it sucks taking the bullets from above for the team. I agree that your next professional step is learning to manage up.

But one silver lining is that there is a cultural shift in the way people manage now. Slow as it might be to start, I think (hope) that in the future, more upper management will be like OP.

I was an ok technical IC but really good people, project, and P and L manager especially during stress/turnaround. So much so that I carved a speciality niche out of running technical teams in tech in specific types of situations.

You need to learn how to manage your managers. Sounds like you are doing good job managing down.

Ha, I’m the opposite. I have a highly technical degree and thought I would hate being a manager but I loved it. But then I took a temporary IC role to build up skills in a certain area and I hate it. I’ve lost my edge/sharpness. I can’t wait to be a manager again because I like people and processes more than technical stuff now.

Totally agree with both of you.

Yup. It sucks. My experience in moving into a more management-oriented role was that I had let go of the things I enjoyed most about my job/career and instead spend most of my time dealing with much less interesting issues/problems that are sadly quite important. While I do still get to work directly on interesting substantive issues, that usually only happens when (1) something has gone seriously wrong and (2) it needs personal attention to fix in an unreasonably short/pressured time frame. Just the way of the world though. There are few paths to advancement that do not require this trade-off IME.

My pedigree was enlisted army NCO-undergrad-MBA. I have a small team now and I legitimately hate managing them. They’re all good people, good at their jobs, and genuinely unproblematic. I don’t like prodding into their lives, the uncomfortableness when someone has to ask if they can log off early to tend to a sick child (I have never ever said no) and upper management hounding me about butts in chairs


I don’t want to play the game. If my folks get their work done on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, I could not care less. I approve all training requests, all pto, all ‘hey I’ll be late’ Texts. I genuinely don’t want to be a manager but it seems as I move up I’ll jus Thrace to ‘play the game’ more.


Just ranting I guess