> This reminds me of the people on HN (and elsewhere) who denigrate middle management as "doing nothing worthwhile". I read those comments and suspect that the

> This reminds me of the people on HN (and elsewhere) who denigrate middle management as "doing nothing worthwhile". I read those comments and suspect that the people making them have never been in management. I mean, the comments aren't coming out of nowhere: Remember the guy who was a supervisor at a wastewater treatment plan and didn't show up at work for 6 years because there was "nothing to do"? [1] Believe it or not, but there are more places like this. I worked for 1.5 years in public service when I was a student (I was level 1 support, so nothing fancy). I could basically spend half of my day learning new technologies and lurking on HN because there was nothing to do. And yet, my uppers decided to hire two more people (one with disabilities for diversity or whatever) because they had budget left. Then I left to work at Amazon to finally do "real work" which creates value, but it was the same except that I experienced occupational therapy by doing useless work instead of doing stuff that interests me or benefits warehouse associates. So, at Amazon logistics you have to execute one project per quarter or so. I had this PhD sitting there, who wanted to change the layout of receiving lanes as his quarterly project. I said that it's bs (so did other people), and his new experimental layout would not change anything except occupying a lot of space for the duration of the project (a few months). After spending a few weeks on building the new layout, letting the experiment run for two months and not getting better results, he came to the conclusion that his idea didn't work and everything was rolled back. After talking to a general manager from another FC they told me that he probably did this to fill his project quota and self-preservation. What a waste of time. [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/75380/man-spain-didnt-show-work-six-years https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/75380/man-spain-didnt-sh...