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"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job" Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work
by helge9210 6y ago
"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job"
Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department.
My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
- matthewmcg 6y agoIt’s hard to see this happening with the rate structures that most firms use. Clients don’t want to pay partner level rates for junior associate work.
- cameronbrown 6y agoThen that boss is failing to scale his/her team properly. It's not really a point of pride if one person can singlehandedly replace all their reports, imo.
- Supermancho 6y ago> My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed. If your boss can do your work, has the time to do your work (eg there isn't enough work), the work doesn't need to be done in parallel, and can do similar quality work, and is willing to do that work, you're not needed. That's the takeaway, without oversimplification, which makes sense.
- markild 6y agoAgreed. If not, you could just as well have said "If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed." It's actually an interesting point that. Oversimplified a bit, I feel there are two different ways that people measure their worth in the workplace. There is "no one else can do what I do" and then there's "I make sure that everything I do can be done by someone else". Personally I much prefer the latter.
- Supermancho 6y ago> If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed. I can program in ASM, since I did it in college. That's a different assertion from "if a colleague can do your job, you're not needed". ASM programmers are still needed. Also, there's the whole "making a baby in 1 month with 9 wombs doesn't work".
- viklove 6y agoSeems like those department heads are bad at scaling up their department's services to adequately utilize the resources at their disposal. They're probably arrogant pricks who make everything flow through them anyway, meaning they're the bottleneck that caused the slowdown in the first place.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MattGaiser 6y ago> My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed. If he has time to do your job. My boss can code, and very well. But he doesn't have time to do so.
- dukeyukey 6y agoMy boss can code better than I do, but he doesn't have the time, he's got CTO stuff to do instead. So I code and he CTOs, and everything tuns out well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dzolob 6y agoThat is, if your boss wants to not get his/her job done.