this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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I became a manager about a year ago. Now that I'm part of the "inner circle", I can see firsthand what I suspected for the past 20 years.
There are 2 types of managers.
There are cunts bosses who treat their employees as property for their personal gain and advancement. They demand productivity at all costs (see: LLM-cogsuckers), punish for mistakes and pressure people into responsibilities they should take. They are the ones who want RTO to exert control on their employees. They are the ones who "joke" you must take a half-day leave if you need to go before 6PM. They are the ones who openly shit on their employees (or other teams employees FWIW) because they're not benefiting them enough. They are not part of the team, they feel and act above everyone in it.
The second type, which I strive to be and most of my closest "manager friend" are, are servant-leaders. They want to get shit done by easing roadblocks and making technologically informed decisions. They understand that productivity is a consequence of a functional team and happy employees. They take on responsibility for mistakes and push the team towards finding solutions to prevent them. They understand that Life^TM^ is more important than work. They are an integral part of the team, they're not the boss but a full member with a different role and different responsibilities, like a PO or a data analyst.
As a tech lead first and a trained Scrum Master second, I feel much more comfortable in the second role. I help the team internally and report and manage external roadblocks with other teams. It's what I already know. I hate the hierarchical part of the job.
Keep at the good stuff, managers with a functional brain are rare. Best of luck keeping sane with all the dumb politicking and other "inner circle" BS.
I fucking hate politics so much...
There's a guy in my team. I need to push him into a more advanced role. Because he deserves it, and because otherwise I might lose him. I brought him in from another team where things were going bad. Real bad. Turns out, all he needed was a human working with another human, not an type 1 cunt demanding output from a walking, breathing toolset. He already fits and fills that role within the team, but I need to make it official. Better pay, more perspectives. I know I'm gonna get cockblocked by the fuckers who still hate him for the wrong reasons. Career reviews are at the end of the year and I already dread it. I need to get involved in politics and I'm terrified of it.
Good job. You're one of the 100 out of that 7,700 managers who actually do something productive and manage properly.
Obviously, that number of 100 is arbitrary to make a wider point. To be fair, it's probably a significantly higher percentage than I provided in my hypothetical. But holy shit are there waaaaay too many of the type 1 and far too few of the type 2 that you outlined.
A note, they demand their own SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION of productivity, not objectively measured productivity itself.
I had 2 such 2^nd^ type bosses in over 20 years.
You really notice they're how you described when they're gone - the deluge of shit begins almost immediately.
This guy manages and gets it.
Most of my managers have been the second type, although how effective they are at it has varied a lot. Some are very passive and that has been good and bad, being left alone is great when things are going well. But when you need help they are useless.
The best have been the ones that know a decent amount about the job, they can either help you directly or know exactly where to point you for it. That or they understand the pain and you can both cry together for 4 days with a SQL database and increasingly vague error messages.