How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?
My job recently decided to return-to-office, which put me back on the market for a fully remote job.
It got me thinking to the other times I've moved on from a company, with 2x of those being due to my immediate manager being completely AWOL. Literally for multiple months these guys just didn't come into the office, a constant stream of excuses.
Which gets to my question, if I've seen this 2x in 10ish years it's got to be somewhat common.
What is the deal with these people? Aren't they immolating their careers? I just don't understand it. It is about being checked out. I am in 50s. I rode a late state startup to IPO and back to PE with a an exit soon. I have got kids to put through college and a parent to be taken care of. I saw nepokids be handed, HANDED , a company they had no business running. So yes I am grabbing what I can. Stop pretending that companies care if you spend 40 hours or if you do 80% of the work. The majority of the time they look at you as a cost per unit and make decisions based on that. I just saw the best lead java developers be laid off after 20 years with the product because he was overpaid salary wise when compared to 10 other contractors from India. All that tribal knowledge is gone and never coming back. Mind you this person could run laps around all 10 of these contractors but corporate America only cares about vanity metrics and looks at employees as cogs in a machine. Oh, man, I was hoping this thread would be about managers who have mastered the art of time management and are doing their jobs in a few hours per week. One of my old managers had it. I would rarely see the dude -- except for once or twice a month, when we'd happen to be in the same meeting. He'd wait until the last bit of the meeting, and then he'd come in -- calm and measured -- with a comment that would blow everyone away. While everyone was nodding at what a good point it was, he'd disappear, never to be seen again until next quarter. Meanwhile, I'm over here working a steady 50 hours/week and barely keeping up. Most weeks are wall-to-wall meetings, combined with a few over-caffeinated nights writing up some doc or another, and then it's a stumble into the weekend with just enough time to recover and start the whole thing over on Monday. I'd like to hear from those kinds of AWOL managers. I have no idea how they do it. Have you considered slowing down to no more than 40 hrs/week and starting to interview for jobs that don’t exploit you? I'm not sure if I qualify here, but I typically work just a few hours a week. I travel with my family most of the year, renting ABB after ABB for months at a time, and not for work. I also have a permanent home that I don't rent out. I'm an official employee and collect a biweekly salary. A handful of people report to me. Some have the same freedom I have. All have access to me for questions and guidance any time they want. I occasionally check in with them, maybe once or twice a month, just to see how they are feeling. They rarely need help with something. When I'm in town we hang out. I occasionally have calls with execs for meetings, not usually more than 4-6 times a year. If you're asking how I did this, here it is: I started by automating systems in my department. This bought me a lot of time. I was down to around 15-30 hours a week. If my phone rang, I saw it as an opportunity to eliminate future phone calls by fixing or automating whatever caused the call. If it was something that required manual effort, I made it a one click procedure for whoever called me. They'd rather push a button than pick up the phone. After a couple of years, I was only working 10 hours a week. I still wanted more freedom, and I was bored. I thought about taking a second job, but I realized I was worth more to myself than the money of another job. I wanted time. This is critical. Realizing that I want time, not money, caused me to focus on the right thing. I invited people who had no jobs and no skills to my house and spent the next two years training them to automate systems. I did this for free. Typically one and sometimes two at a time. We all became friends. When someone was good enough, I hired them. If I got push back from my superiors about why we needed to hire, I would ask, "Do we want this to be as smooth as the last thing I did?" Some people quit part way through learning. This was frustrating, but it's a price you have to pay to get really really good people who trust you. The handful who stayed earn better than average full time salaries, work 10 hours a week most weeks, sometimes none at all, and maybe a couple of weeks a year they buckle down to rebuild something, or change something for a customer. They don't carry second jobs. The last part is also very important. If you or your team carries a second job, then you don't care enough about the importance of free time to invest a ton of time when it matters to meticulously automate the shit out of everything, down to the finest detail. There is almost nothing to call my department about. Everything almost runs itself, including my people, and their people. Culture is key. I don't run the company, but I run the culture in my little corner of it. It's a culture of making time, not money. And, not just for ourselves, for others. When we make time for other people they don't have any reason to care when we are "AWOL." What? It’s not that they’re crushing everything, it’s that they’re doing nothing and letting you be crushed I’ve never encountered this. I’ve had managers who were promoted into incompetence, but they were still present and doing their best. I can’t imagine how someone would keep their job if they weren’t doing it… The teams I’ve worked on would almost all express concern to their manager’s manager that they weren’t getting the structure, support, and direction they need from their manager. It couldn’t last long. AWOL as in they don't come in at all, or AWOL as in they don't produce any noticeable artifacts or effect on your personal or team output? I manage a team and we have a return to office policy that I'm waiting to be reprimanded for not following before I actually come in, but I also don't hold my people to any standard beyond what I'm willing to do. I couldn't imagine ordering them to go in and not doing so myself. I only mean AWOL in that they aren't available/online/in-office. So just cashing paychecks without actually doing anything. I had a boss once who was hoarding projects to manage - he wanted to have fingers in all possible pies. As a result, he basically spent most of his time in transit between meetings (not even in the meetings themselves...). If it sounds great, it wasn't. He was notionally in charge of ~50 projects or so and a blocker on each one. Nothing definitive could be done without his approval, which was hard, as he wasn't even au fait with the project's status. So to get anything done you had to (a) physically find him and pin him down, (b) explain what approval he needs to give and why, (c) let him go to think about it, and (d) repeat every few days until he makes a decision (or lets you make it instead). His desk was flanked by two piles of "in-tray" papers about a foot tall, from earlier years when people thought leaving reports and forms on his desk was a way to get them in his job queue. Alas, he basically never sat at his desk, and when he did, he just peeked at the flanked screen with no sense of irony. I’m not suggesting he was one, but there’s a version of this person where they not only do this but they’re also incompetent. Since upper management has even less domain-specific knowledge than this hypothetical person, they appear extraordinarily productive because of their calendars and workloads. I watched one systematically eliminate good people using this method by laundering accountability to them for things that were totally out of their control. If you ever encounter this person, my advice is to leave the company ASAP. I had a manager who I didn't see (digitally or in person) for 3 months at a stretch, and he was one of the best I ever had. Small company that used to be bigger and we needed to finalize a migration that'd been in progress for like 7 years. It kept being delayed by leadership who'd get distracted, so the final 20% would never get done, we'd build more tech debt, and then the 20% turned into 23%. We'd argue to pay down the debt, get 1.5 weeks to tackle it, get it down to 20% remaining again and then delay for another couple months. Repeat this for years and you have a treading water situation for years. This manager got hired, saw this was holding the company back (spend too high since 2 systems of infra and 2 places to wrangle features) and lobbied hard to finish it off. Said it'll take 7 months but we'd cut our spend by like 30%. Leadership agreed. Manager kicked off the project and then just disappeared. Leadership then got distracted and wanted new things. Manager would re-appear for discussions EXCLUSIVELY with leadership, convince them to stay the course, and then disappear again. This happened repeatedly, probably every couple weeks, but he only interacted with leadership, firewalling us from them. This manager had probably 3 meetings total with us the team over the course of the project because he trusted us to carry it out. Each meeting was him saying, "it looks like you're all making great progress, let's keep it that way." Then disappear again. We had two of those meetings after the start meeting, and the final meeting at month 7 was "hooray, you did it, everything's implemented, all traffic's migrated, all error rates are well within tolerances, and we've turned off the old machines, saving us loads of money. Congratulations! Here's a nice gift and a bonus, let's celebrate!" We did, and then not long after he left for greener pastures. Leadership loved him, the team loves him, but he saw his time had come. Love you Ahti, you were probably the best manager I ever had! That sounds like a great manager. Not really the same situation as what I saw. Anecdotally, the idea of a career is dying among many I know. People just want the money. So some of it is probably being Overemployed. I have a job where I am just doing the minimum to keep it. Some of it is just waiting to be fired while their build their own businesses. > People just want the money. I cannot imagine doing a job just for the money myself; I rather sleep under a bridge (probably not really but luckily I don’t have that issue). I just cannot belief it’s true; people here whine about tech all the time and updating to the latest stuff etc while you can make 250-350/hr doing CRUD in Java + Oracle in enterprises with knowledge you hardly have to update for the past two decades. If you are really in it ‘only for the money’, you have a Delaware company, cayman accounts, live in dubai and you do multiple boring crud jobs for Fortune 500 companies that require no learning with max income and you invest that money in ETFs. You don’t build your own business (very large chance of failure aka wasted no-money time) or you build one by talking your vc friend in investing in you so there exists no waste. And you don’t wait to get fired, you try continuously to find more higher paying and easier stuff and just do it concurrently. In most boring non tech companies with 100k+ employees no one will notice you underperform as that is the norm. >I cannot imagine doing a job just for the money myself Realistically, this is the source of 90% of misery in developed nations. It is logistically impossible for even half of all people to have jobs they enjoy so much it doesn't make them at least somewhat miserable doing it 40 hours a week. It's not that easy to do Java+enterprise CRUD job. Even though there might not be much to learn technically, you will be expected to learn about functional/business rules related to the application. ERP software can be one of the most complicated soul sucking job. It is in here where stuff gets tough, in that you have to deal with legacy codebase, poorly documented rules, bug would have become feature etc. If you don't bring more value to the table and just coast off without learning anything, you will not get hike and effectively be taking demotion year after year. You will not have any bargaining power since they can replace you with a new grad anytime. I agree somewhat, but we were talking about maximising money without caring about the work; that, at least to me, means I am working as a company for a company, not in a traditional job. Contracting as a company means I can deduct almost everything I buy and/or charge it to the client which means more money. It also means multiple clients and work from ‘my office’ (which looks a lot like my home) has been allowed forever as if you are a company they cannot dictate where you work. Demotion does not exist; they can just tell me they don’t need my services anymore: I have too many clients so I have to say ‘in 6 months’ anyway and get offers all the time for more. And yes you are right about the learning but that happens automatically when you are building ERP stuff. But that’s always the case: my point is: if you chase the newest tech crap, you are not focusing on making max money as you don’t need to update your tech knowledge. No one cares about that outside the tech realm. For both old and new tech, the business rules you learn by doing and you start to see patterns fairly fast so the next project will be similar to the current. I don’t want to think how many times I implemented almost identical employee benefits self service portals… Yes, I was talking from the POV of employee. If I am going through the trouble of setting my own company and doing contracting job which involve similar work, then to maximize money for work, I would be thinking of offering some SaaS service via the company. If so many companies want a similar thing, then there is some gap in the market. Different budgets (in a lot of companies they don't have to do paperwork for a project that fits in the assigned budget, but monthly contracts have to be improved higher up and with the IT dep etc) and one doesn’t exclude the other; once I built it for that company I can recreate it and try to sell if I believe it's worth it. My first SaaS company actually was created (in 2001) when one of my enterprise clients said I was allowed to not only sell the solution we built for them but they would actually encourage their competitors to use it so they get new features without having to start a new project themselves. But we kept selling custom/from scratch implementations as well because some companies simply want to own things. The company still exists and sells the same product (very much changed over the years). Was built in Java. yes that makes sense You need the money to survive and none of the tech or business will matter in the end. Optimize accordingly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397 (examples of useless work) If that is the case, you would end your life (as it doesn’t matter) or optimise the hell out of the apparently miserable time working like I said. Or maybe it does matter and people do pick jobs based on other factors IF they have the choice. And GP was talking about people with a choice as it seems choiceless people don’t hang on HN. Or just coast, as others in the thread have mentioned. It is a perfectly fine choice if you can make it work. If you “just cannot belief it’s true,” get out more. You haven’t talked to enough people. Are there really a lot of 250-350/hr jobs building crud apps for enterprises? Where is this market drawing from? Even in Europe I got those amounts for those types of jobs; I don’t do them anymore as I don’t like them anymore (when I started out it was interesting and sometimes challenging work, now it’s just crud; I can dream up those things without effort), but if you have a bit of a network of enterprise management types, you can get more and more of those gigs. Usually departmental apps which every dep will have done ‘their own way’ (which means it’s all the same but built from scratch every time). So somebody is going to pay 250$/hr for a job requiring only stale public knowledge? Why hasn't it been outsourced yet? If I only cared about money, I'd probably just make drugs :) What career? Companies haven't been loyal to employees in a long time, so now they get to enjoy employees not being loyal to them. > Companies haven't been loyal to employees in a long time, [...] Some companies have, some companies haven't. Career, dont make me laugh - the concept was failing for my dad already. There is no loyalty or trust from companies and you can be axed at any minute without notice. It's time to realize that a "career" was just indentured service with extra steps.
Take what you can from corporations and give nothing back. If you see a career as some kind of progression within a single company, then sure. I always saw it as my own progression, and I've rarely stayed at a single company longer than 2 years. I have no loyalty to companies, and I don't expect it from them either. Doesn't mean I don't have a career! Why would I care about my manager not being in the office? We probably don't share a continent anyway. On the other hand, sometimes it is culture. I had manager that had 100+ direct reports. He never had 1x1 and barely managed to get all of the payrol/timesheet/pto aprovals on time. > Why would I care about my manager not being in the office? I suspect OP might be more interested in the manager being available, not so much where the manager is physically located. Correct, I myself am fully remote. I've had a few AWOL managers, but in each case they had another team as well. They spend all their time on the other team and expect the team I'm on to run itself. So they aren't AWOL from the company, they just have 0 presence in my work life. Wow. This is not just me who’s seen this? This is a phenomenon. Brilliant. Explains a lot about some of my managers. Yeah I’ve seen that before many times and usually they’re moonlighting. So it’s not career immolation necessarily, it’s more like double dipping. Ding-ding-ding. I’ve worked with a manager at a customer that rarely turned up to even online meetings and even complained that this was taking time away from his personal business! He was a full-time employee using business hours at his job to run a side-hussle. After this experience I’ve learned to recognise the signs. I suppose this makes more sense, though I feel like if they'd put in even a partial effort they could've dragged it out much longer than they did. Boom, FAANG wages at boring mid-west companies. Looks like a silent quitting schema.
I'd prefer absent boss than someone that micromanage what I'm doing. My manager's great. Their manager can't even be assed to tell my manager when they leave for vacation. I wish my manager went AWOL. Would certainly increase my productivity