Part your experience depends on your organization, as well as your disposition and predilections. My foray into management absolutely fucking sucked. I was a s

Part your experience depends on your organization, as well as your disposition and predilections. My foray into management absolutely fucking sucked. I was a shock absorber and clutch plate between team members and board/executives/senior leadership. On bad days I was the bearer of bad news or executioner. It was strictly a top-down affair; despite endless bloviating about open doors, open minds, and being empowered to lead and make changes, I was expected to do what they told me, keep myself and my team in line, and if I had any ideas they’d “bring it up in their next leadership meeting” (spoiler: they won’t, or if they do, it will be disregarded). Despite given a mandate, I had very little authority. You also have to deal with idiosyncrasies with other managers. Lazy ones you have to pick up the slack for lest you become blocked. Bad ones who poison their team and create mistrust that spreads to others. Overeager ones that somehow seem to get their way or maybe have an easier department but who nonetheless get the attention of senior leadership where unfair expectations are placed on you. The day-to-day was miserable. I’m highly technical and I like to get my hands dirty, being a manager vaporized a significant portion of why I enjoyed working at a tech company and mostly left me with the reasons I don’t. Being a Jira or spreadsheet jockey, filling out PIPs, IDPs, KPIs, budget proposals, expense reports, screening interviewees, managing petty squabbles between people, juggling PTO calendars, scrum bullshit, and endless fucking meetings. I’ve never been so busy doing what felt like so little. Sometimes it felt like I was babysitting people that, as a peer, I enjoyed working with. I was also utterly repulsed by HR. I don’t know if HR has made a bad turn lately, was always like this, or my experience was just organizational, but these people are Stasi-like agents that seem to want you to spy on every little detail and use it against you and the employee. Yet when I actually needed them, e.g. conflict resolution, they were completely incompetent and insensitive, enraging employees rather than empowering them. They always sided with senior leadership, even when that person violated our own handbook. Unlike the author, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. Senior leadership doesn’t have a lot of openings. At best, I just get shifted around to other teams and maybe get dropped in one less fucked. I enjoyed mentoring a lot, but sometimes reports looked to me like I’m a parent or a therapist and it was too much (and HR useless). I enjoyed strategy and design, but senior leadership was frustrating and frequently didn’t listen or involve me at all. I enjoyed delegating and giving reports opportunity for growth, allowing me to stress about the minute details less, but now my ass was on the line for the entire team which is waaaay more stress than just doing the work. I generally chalk it up to me being a poor fit for the role in a dysfunctional company, but talking to other managers, it seemed my experience was not uncommon.