Is Management An Actual Job?

In reality? No.

There are a couple of different ways to answer this question:

If you are an executive-level person: “Yes, generally. I could do without them and am looking into automating them, if we’re being honest. But I don’t really want to talk to the worker bees. That feels beneath me. I’m past that point of my professional arc. So I need managers in that sense.”

If you are a middle manager type: “Absolutely. Nothing would get done around here without me. I make the trains run and keep the peons on task.”

If you are a standard employee: “I’ve had good ones, but honestly I’ve mostly had bad ones. The bad ones have been the worst part of those jobs. A lot of them don’t understand the work to be done, or how to prioritize it. To be productive, you almost need to go around them.”

I’d say these are the conventional approaches to what “management” even means, and how actually useful it is — it varies by rank and title how you will perceive the idea of management, and it requires you to admit that work is an exercise in feudalism. The kings don’t want to talk to the pawns, so there needs to be a layer in the middle of the kings and the pawns, and if that layer s terrible, it generally can be ignored so long as the kings are doing their thing (deals), the pawns are doing their thing (tasks), and the revenue can be stated as “growing.” Basically, there’s no true responsibility in the middle management ranks, but there’s a high perception of responsibility, which allows for virtue-signaling galore and justifications of necessity. In sheer realistic terms, though, most middle managers cripple the bottom line.

Good essay earlier this week from Ed Zitron on whether management is a real job, including some notable pull-outs: