Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise
Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I almost always had something interesting to share on how I do things, people were learning from me.<p>Things were swell. It was an extremely positive environment.<p>But I got demoted 7 or so months later simply because the other managers hated me. I didn&#x27;t talk about charts showing increased amount of tickets per sprint resolved, about increased productivity, about how to make people more efficient via some BS measures that never really work (except maybe in a Chinese factory or in a pyramid-scheme marketing organization?). I knew how to make my people efficient and I was doing it. On the managerial meetings I was bored to tears and eventually I just told everybody in the room (including the CEO) -- &quot;People. Why are we here on this meeting? I only see this as an excuse for everybody to congratulate themselves on how awesome you are. Speaking of which (at this point I pointed at 2 other managers) the only thing you ever managed to do was impede me by imposing waiting in inter-team communication for weeks while your devs are telling me they are idle and have nothing to do -- and you&#x27;re also criticising my managerial techniques no matter the fact that in this 150+ people organization my team is the only one not behind schedule&quot;. Or something like that.<p>Needless to say, I got demoted -- and left the place -- shortly after.<p>Thinking of it 8 years later, I&#x27;d absolutely do the same but I&#x27;d use even more brutal language.<p>Management needs less BS. It doesn&#x27;t deserve its current breed of slackers who licked bottoms most of their conscious lives to get to such a position and then they figured they&#x27;ll unofficially retire at 40 while officially leeching salaries into their 60s (read: show up at the job but practially do nothing).<p>As any human system, inertia and credentialism are a huge problem. This has to change.