“Now I’m Just A Manager”

I played tennis on Sunday with a guy that works in the server hardware group over at IBM. We were in between games, and chatting about our respective careers. When I asked him what he did for IBM, he said “I am an engineer by trade, but now I’m just a manager.”

This is one of the stranger things about corporate America to me, and it happens where I work as well. If you are good at what you do, you eventually don’t get to do what you are really good at anymore. You eventually just shuffle spreadsheets around, go to meetings, and argue about inane things to justify your existence.

I find it to be both discouraging and a horribly bad idea.