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The lower you are in the organization the more work you are likely doing and the less flexibility you have. As you ascend the organizational ladder what matter

The lower you are in the organization the more work you are likely doing and the less flexibility you have. As you ascend the organizational ladder what matters is your ability to organize and motivate others, relationship building and communication skills, and your general vision / insights / experience. The above means that you can be pretty lazy later in your career if you are just highly competent at those things. If you are hard working it certainly helps, but give me a lazy but competent and fair leader over a hard working incompetent one any day. However for bottom of the org chart employees hard work and accuracy of work are most valued.

ghaff 5y ago
I don't disagree with your general take although it matters what sort of higher-level position. It's true that a senior individual contributor can potentially cruise if they can churn out quality work quickly. But senior execs mostly work pretty hard, (normally) a ton of travel, lots of calls at all hours of the day and night, etc. ADDED: Not sure why people disagree with this. Yes, those senior execs are well-paid (some would say excessively paid at the largest companies) for their hard (as in long hours/stress) work, but it doesn't mean they're just taking it easy.
- etempleton 5y ago
  I agree. It is a different type of work, but it is a lot of work nonetheless. There is a greater degree of flexibility afforded to executives and many consider the actual work much more desirable. I think many have trouble understanding the value that a good executive brings and seeing the types of work that they do as "real."
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah, as a senior IC, I have a lot of flexibility compared to an exec who probably has most of their day scheduled including late night calls. And I fully appreciate this when I'm on a "road trip" of some sort when I'm pretty much scheduled from breakfast through post-dinner. And sure, a senior exec has freedom to say that this AM doesn't work for me--reschedule things. But there are still a lot of meetings/calls at odd hours.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  I think most people have this weird idea that execs don't actually do anything and their job is ridiculously easy.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  If you are a manager and work hard then you are doing a bad job. A good manager will make sure that his team has the skills and autonomy to make the right decisions without constantly involving him/her. Leaving the manager to focus on identifying and improving the current bottleneck (Theory of Constraints style).
jjj123 5y ago
I mostly agree with you but I do think you’re missing the most important piece: who has power and leverage. Low level employees don’t have much power (in the US at least) so they’re overworked and underpaid. Senior leadership are literally the people who make the rules, so they’re not going to force the same degrading conditions on themselves as they put on low level workers. Then there’s something like the cushy engineering jobs some of us have in SV, that’s because they have power in the form of a labor shortage and can demand good working conditions.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  > ...have power in the form of a labor shortage... It can be much more than this. A short order cook might prepare $1,500 worth of food in a shift. $30,000 in a month. It's hard work in a busy diner. As an extreme example, at one point, WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. That's 10,000,000 users per engineer. If a user was worth $1/month, they were each responsible for $10,000,000 per month in revenue. That's an extreme, but even at my company, for example, one engineer is responsible for about $200,000/month in revenue.
  - jjj123 5y ago
    I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive. If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged. Edited for clarity
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism? You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.
aksss 5y ago
No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis. The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.
- Fricken 5y ago
  CEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.
  - aksss 5y ago
    That’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Nope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.
  - aksss 5y ago

ghaff 5y ago

I don't disagree with your general take although it matters what sort of higher-level position. It's true that a senior individual contributor can potentially cruise if they can churn out quality work quickly. But senior execs mostly work pretty hard, (normally) a ton of travel, lots of calls at all hours of the day and night, etc. ADDED: Not sure why people disagree with this. Yes, those senior execs are well-paid (some would say excessively paid at the largest companies) for their hard (as in long hours/stress) work, but it doesn't mean they're just taking it easy.

etempleton 5y ago
I agree. It is a different type of work, but it is a lot of work nonetheless. There is a greater degree of flexibility afforded to executives and many consider the actual work much more desirable. I think many have trouble understanding the value that a good executive brings and seeing the types of work that they do as "real."
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, as a senior IC, I have a lot of flexibility compared to an exec who probably has most of their day scheduled including late night calls. And I fully appreciate this when I'm on a "road trip" of some sort when I'm pretty much scheduled from breakfast through post-dinner. And sure, a senior exec has freedom to say that this AM doesn't work for me--reschedule things. But there are still a lot of meetings/calls at odd hours.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
I think most people have this weird idea that execs don't actually do anything and their job is ridiculously easy.
mbrodersen 5y ago
If you are a manager and work hard then you are doing a bad job. A good manager will make sure that his team has the skills and autonomy to make the right decisions without constantly involving him/her. Leaving the manager to focus on identifying and improving the current bottleneck (Theory of Constraints style).

jjj123 5y ago

I mostly agree with you but I do think you’re missing the most important piece: who has power and leverage. Low level employees don’t have much power (in the US at least) so they’re overworked and underpaid. Senior leadership are literally the people who make the rules, so they’re not going to force the same degrading conditions on themselves as they put on low level workers. Then there’s something like the cushy engineering jobs some of us have in SV, that’s because they have power in the form of a labor shortage and can demand good working conditions.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
> ...have power in the form of a labor shortage... It can be much more than this. A short order cook might prepare $1,500 worth of food in a shift. $30,000 in a month. It's hard work in a busy diner. As an extreme example, at one point, WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. That's 10,000,000 users per engineer. If a user was worth $1/month, they were each responsible for $10,000,000 per month in revenue. That's an extreme, but even at my company, for example, one engineer is responsible for about $200,000/month in revenue.
- jjj123 5y ago
  I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive. If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged. Edited for clarity
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism? You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.

aksss 5y ago

No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis. The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.

Fricken 5y ago
CEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.
- aksss 5y ago
  That’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mbrodersen 5y ago
Nope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.
- aksss 5y ago