Absolutely. As someone who manages a small team, my duties are advocating for the people who work for me, listening to the people closest to the problem, mediating disputes between people with different solutions, and ensuring we are all working towards the same overall goals. Most of the success of the team is directly attributed to their work. My biggest contribution is making sure they have what they need to do their job.
Not everyone in my position is a sniveling little shit, as much as you may think. I do get paid more than my team, but not by some ridiculous margin. The lowest paid person gets 70% what I do and the highest paid person is at 95%. When I took over it was no shit closer to 40% for the lowest paid member. I fought for that to be fixed and burned up a lot if political capital doing it too.
When COVID came along and pay cuts and layoffs were a real threat, I told my boss to cut my salary before anyone else’s. We never had to, thankfully, but I literally told him I would quit if they cut one of my subordinates pay or laid them off without first taking out of my pocket.
I had a direct report who, for three years wanted to be in a leadership role. I fought for a new position for him and put my own ass on the line recommending him for promotion every chance I got. He’s been promoted past me and I hope (since I can’t see his salary anymore) he is getting paid more than me because he’s earned it.
I’m not some superstar manager, but I do feel like I keep my team out of the political battles and turf wars so they can focus on doing what they do best without dealing with all that crap. That’s my job. When something goes wrong, I’m accountable. So when the people doing the work get it wrong and take a critical system offline by fat fingering a command, I’m the one answering the phones and taking all the shit for it and smoothing things over with stake holders. And unless it was a result of gross negligence, I’m not going to give them hell for it either because I’ve fucking been there before.
I didn’t even want this damn job. I was perfectly happy being the technical lead and not having job recruiting and performance reviews to do, but I took it because I knew at the very least I would do my best to advocate for the people I care about, and that’s not something I could say about everyone who applied.
So you can make snap judgements and assume because I manage a team that I’m just collecting a paycheck while everyone else does all the hard work, but I don’t and I won’t because it’s unethical and shitty and despite your own insecurities, I actually give a fuck about other people.
Considering how important it is to me that I’m not some piece of shit manager, yeah, it was a little personal. I take that kind of thing seriously. It kinda doesn’t work as a meme reference without the meme.
The annoying thing is: if everyone did this, phantom traffic jams wouldn’t be a thing, and even real road obstructions would have significantly less impact and we would all get where we want to go faster, collectively. But we won’t, because I got mine.
Fun fact, related to this: learned and learnt are also both correct. I always assumed learnt was a redneck thing (I’m from the south), but it turns out the Brits use it too. Who knew?
I’ve heard it used in a sentence like “When I was a boy, my daddy done learnt me a thing or two about fishin’”. Which is why it’s associated with southern slang, I think. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Right, I get that it’s not grammatically correct in that context, but the word itself is valid. I had always thought “learnt” was akin to “ain’t”, but that’s not the case. Both “learned” and “learnt” are correct, but the latter is less commonly used in the US.
As an American, I think the moment I said “which one” when asked if I had heard about the mass shooting in wherever it was I can’t even remember now, that was when I realized how fucked our gun policies are.
Which pill do you choose? (i.imgur.com)
Distromums (lemmy.world)
A genre of Country Music... (lemmy.world)
Drive aggressively ≠ Arrive early (web.archive.org)
But it's all about convenience (teacup.social)
Should of built a better foundation (lemmy.world)
Floppy disks were high-tech weapons once (files.mastodon.social)
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (lemmy.ml)
Here we go again…
Your package was delivered (sh.itjust.works)