One of my greatest stresses was my boss either giving away the store on things that sold like hotcakes at full price, or refusing discounts because of concerns about increasing cost of sales.
My solution, build a business with a very service centric pricing model. Parts are at cost +10%, labor is reasonable.
Now that I am the boss, I make the decisions and get to live with it no matter what, and I think I make good decisions and have only regretted a handful of them and all of them were over little stuff. Things like telling a customer I would do some additional service at little or no charge and it turned out to be a much bigger issue requiring 2-3 hours of my day when I thought it would be a buzz by, flip a setting and or reload a driver and be done.
True in some cases, if the person was “old money” and had more opportunities as a result. But for many bosses you may be confusing cause and effect.
I’ve been a boss for years, don’t particularly like it, but do particularly like that I’m putting aside extra bux for my kids’ educations. I also like when I can make a difference in one of my staff members’ lives. I don’t expect to ever like my job again, but I do what I gotta do - I’m the sole breadwinner.
At this point, the technical skills that got me started have atrophied enough that I’m probably stuck in management anyway.
Been there, done that. CEO-equivalent is merely okay (the money helps my attitude), but middle management sucks giant sweaty donkey balls. I like being a peon. I’m efficiently competent 7-4 on weekdays, then I go home to my life.
I like being a boss and I think (and have been told) that I’m a good one. I also like having a boss who’s a good boss. I’ve learned a lot from her. I don’t think I’m ready for her job yet, though!
A common problem in engineering is that no engineer wants to become the boss. I mean think about it. Would Dilbert really want to become the next PHB? This leaves me in the position of having peaked, as far as the corporate ladder is concerned. I can’t go any higher and stay an engineer. At my level, I can still do real work and actually enjoy my day. If I went into management I’d get a raise, but then I would spend my day worrying about things like budgets and schedules, which is something I definitely would NOT want to do.
I tend to be the highest-ranked person at work. I have bosses, but they are less likely to be there than I am.
It’s… okay. I pretty much get my way, but I pretty much have to take the fall if my way is stupid. There are days when I’m the most stressed out person at work, and days when I have absolutely nothing to do and can essentially kick back and feel proud of everyone. I am always always always on the hook for customer relations, even when I’m on vacation or home sick, but I can also do a lot more of “Tell him I’m at lunch!” than anyone else.
I’m the boss over a small department, and I like it.
My boss is 4,000 miles away and we rarely interact. A couple of years ago, we went the whole year and only talked maybe 3 or 4 times so I don’t have to worry about what he thinks of a daily basis.
It can be a pain in the ass at times, but what position isn’t?
Being a peon sucks, I like being a supervisor/boss. One thing that makes the stress and pressure less significant is to have great people beside and above you on the ladder.
I hated when there was a goal or problem and I had to listen and execute someone else’s plan, whether I thought it was a good idea or not. Being able to do things your way almost all the time makes work a lot more bearable. This may sound awful, but it is great to come up with kick-ass plans that work that you actually don’t have to excecute yourself- you just have to come up with the idea and set them in motion.
Amen. Do I wanna trade my calculator in on a spreadsheet of Accounts Recievable?? No way! I think lots of very good engineers have withered on the vine after being ‘kicked upstairs’. Yah, now I do my own accounts recievable but hey it’s my dime, totally. I still get to crunch numbers. Yay!
My objective used to be “middle management”: production manager, lab manager. Tops, I’d want to be “VP for Quality” or “Operations Manager” - not CEO. If I found the financial parts so interesting I would have a degree in Finance, not Engineering. I am an engineer because I wanted to direct other people’s work… but I’m not interested in “agressive sales” and I’m interested in Finance only inasmuch as it defines the acceptability of projects and processes; I’m not interested in juggling loans at twelve different banks with treasury bonds at different terms, like my financial bro does.
Now that I work as a consultant, I’m amenable to be project manager at some point, but I’m also fine with being one in a project and back to a “normal” consultant in another. This is a life of short term contracts… no ladders. For the last five years I’ve had subordinates (junior consultants) twice, but told as many as 30 thousand people how to do their jobs better. Therefore my “bossiness” is perfectly satisfied without any need to be the official boss.
A couple jobs back, I was in a company which told us they wanted people to eventually become partners. I asked what did they expect of a partner; two years later I’m still waiting for the answer. With definitions like that, I see no reason to be interested, you know?
I have been the boss in a couple of organizations, and didn’t really care for it. All is fine until you have a very needy or psychotic employee. This has happened to me twice – one person, I hired because she had a good reference from a respected acquaintance (only later did I find out that the acquaintance was just trying to help the employee, and withheld information from me about her issues). In the other case, I inherited a person who has scary anger management issues.
So my fun moments of Bosshood include: being told by my employee that “thanks to the way you’ve made me so miserable, I think I’ll just jump out that [11th story] window.” And having one employee physically assault another.
In both cases, I dealt with the situation well. But that’s not how I like to spend my time. I’d rather do substantive work than spend all my time plotting how to motivate/train/comfort/whatever employees.
Bingo! One of my best friends at my last job - an outstand aero engineer and stress analyst - took a promotion because he thought he could “do good things.” He became my boss, which really wasn’t a biggie, since I’d worked for him when he was my project lead. But after I transferred, his emails became increasingly bitter (I don’t think there was a connection) - his frustration level shot up, and within a year, he asked to be sent back down into the trenches. Although, to be fair, I think that was more a product of the toxic upper management than it was indicative of Chuck’s abilities. I suspect, had he been elsewhere, he’d have been a damn fine boss of engineers. ’Toons, you crack me up!
Maybe. My experience is that, in the technical professions (engineers, programmers, actuaries, etc.), the most successful people often have the worst people skills. Moving them into management just sets them up for failure. Companies with sense create career tracks for such people in which they may continue to do what they do best while enjoying increasing levels of compensation in recognition of their critical contributions to the operation.
Such people need to keep very current in their skill sets and will leave if they feel they’re falling behind.
Nope. I don’t want to be responsible for others’ actions, especially to infantile upper managers. It’s a ripoff. You have to give up too much time, and you have to lie to employees about the real intentions of upper management in order to get them to play along. No thanks.
I became an engineer because I wanted to build things and I wanted to solve technical problems. I want to keep doing those things until I’m ready to retire. I also want to keep learning new things. And I don’t mean new ways to make Powerpoint charts or generate schedules using MS Project.
One problem is, I’m in a company that wants everyone to be a manager. I’m not exaggerating; at one point, they were trying to get 100% of engineering to join their management association.
Another problem: I’m pretty ‘old school’ in that I do the job I’m assigned because I accept a paycheck for doing it. I expect everyone else to do the same. That’s not a fashionable attitude anymore. It’s nice to believe in the work you’re doing and to feel like you’re part of a team that’s working on a worthy project, but it’s not mandatory for me. If I were to move into a position where I was responsible for motivating and managing others, I would not be very successfull with my, “Do it because I said so and I’m the boss!” attitude.
I sometimes think our company would be better served if they choose people with a background in child psychology for middle management positions.
I’ve accepted the fact that my career peaked at about the 15 year mark. I only hope that I can continue to find interesting things to work on for a few more years before they decide to outsource everything.
A reminder, as if I needed one, of why I love engineers and not CEOs. (Or to simplify matters a bit, why I only dated MIT men and disdained Harvard guys when I was a college student.)
Technically, I’m not a manager, but I have to oversee the operations of the homes, make sure staff is doing their jobs, and train them on new and renewed procedures. If someone screws up, I take the hit. I’m also responsible for relations with the different types of customers we have.
I hate it.
In my old job, my boss was a hundred miles away and he trusted me to do my job. I did my work and some others’ too. I only had to deal with people on a limited basis and even though I was responsible for making sure they knew what to do also, it wasn’t anything like the whining and backbiting I hear on a daily basis now, not to mention the people that I have trained, and trained, and trained who still don’t manage to do things right.
I can deal for now but I can’t wait till I can start looking for another job.
