> I can't think of a more useless profession than manager. I used to think that, but it just means you haven't worked with a good manager. Which isn't surprisi

> I can't think of a more useless profession than manager. I used to think that, but it just means you haven't worked with a good manager. Which isn't surprising since they are rare. But they exist. A good manager will keep all roadblocks and distractions out of your way so you can be in the zone most of the time and they will play the corporate politics on your behalf so you get interesting projects and promotions. A most dramatic demonstration of this happened at one company where I had my best manager ever succeeded by my worst manager ever. The worst wasn't a bad person or anything, just incompetent as a manager. Under the great manager I was convinced this was the best-run company ever. Never any emergencies, never unreasonable requests, could focus all my time on interesting projects in different parts of the company. It was so great. Then the great manager left for greener pastures and the incompetent one was hired. None of the upper management changed so the company was running the same as before. Suddenly I was inundated with nonsense escalations every day, constantly being pushed to stop working on the interesting projects, unreasonable time demands, etc. None of this was orignating from the incompetent manager directly, it came from the SVPs above. So turns out the awesome manager was just absorbing all this noise and keeping those in his team shielded away from it so we could happily focus on tech work. The incompetent manager just forwarded everything that came to him. Less than 6 months after the manager switch, I also left the company.