On: Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)

[ianmcgowan]

I moved from IC to manager to director. Meetings in general are a huge time suck, and by the end of my tenure, I was basically triple-booked for the entire day every day. Every evening was an exercise in deciding who to piss off. And the emails! <Marvin/Android Voice>Don't get me started on the emails! :-) Finishing the twilight of my career as an IC consulting, and it's much better for me.

[beardedwizard → ianmcgowan]

How did you get started consulting? I'm in a similar spot, been a director, don't really want to go back to it.

[groby_b → ianmcgowan]

Took the same path, just wanted to commiserate on the emails. It'll teach you where Bezos got the idea for his infamous "!"/"?" emails.

Somebody burn email and chat to the ground, I want to move back to interoffice memos ;)

[aprdm → groby_b]

Can you share a bit more about Bezos email ?

[groby_b → aprdm]

Ancient Internet lore at this point :)

Bezos used to (supposedly, didn't work for him) have the habit to forward emails to reports (direct and further down), with just an added comment of "!" or "?"

"!" was "Do something about this" "?" was "Can you please explain WTH?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/MBA/comments/kwryld/on_product_mana... is an example story of that. There are plenty more.

The exclamation mark version seems apocryphal, though.

[AbstractH24 → ianmcgowan]

As someone who has been around for decades I assume, do you thnk anything tech has created has made it easier to manage people or teams?

I'm only 35, but I don't see how it could of. Systems should be able to improve collaboration and alignment, but I don't see many that do.

Or maybe I don't know how much worse it could be.