You have to draw the line somewhere though, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as you're making it sound. I'm sure I could find someone who is a director or ev

You have to draw the line somewhere though, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as you're making it sound. I'm sure I could find someone who is a director or even VP but is still very close to the "laborer" side of things, especially in tech. Likewise, there are plenty of low-level front line managers with dozens of reports who have no idea what they do day-to-day. It's easy to separate the Waltons from the person icing a cake in a bakery because they're dozens of reports apart. But it's much harder to actually put that line between two individual people at any level of the organization.