I got my start in hotels & restaurants, worked my way up to being a hotel general manager, before switching into tech. I’ve been a solo contributor, a team member, a manager, and an outside consultant, at companies big & small.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably used to working in tech with your hands.

You’ve designed, built, and fixed stuff yourself.

You’re finding it less fulfilling to work with AI because you’re discovering that you’re often not doing the designing, building, and fixing yourself, but instead, you’re using plain English commands to tell something else to do it. That something else is getting the dopamine rush of seeing the code compile successfully, of solving a mysterious bug, of putting a finished product into end user hands.

And you hate it.

You miss how your job used to be.

Your job is to use plain English to convince workers to get tasks done in a way you find personally acceptable.

You’re frustrated because the output isn’t as good as you’d like, and you can’t figure out how to get what you really want out of them.

You didn’t hire these workers. They were somebody else’s idea, and you inherited them.

You want workers with better skills and a stronger work ethic, but you’re not allowed to hire the ones you really want. Maybe they’re too expensive, more than your company is willing to pay, or your company has just made it a policy to use workers from a certain contractor.

Some people find that they actually enjoy this new job role, but the important thing to understand is that it’s a different job role than individual contributor or team lead. Management is a specialized career that requires different skill sets. If you’re one of the lucky few who enjoys this and succeeds at it, that’s great! I’m happy for you. For the rest of you, keep reading.

You don’t get to pick the strategy of what the company is doing overall. A manager higher than you simply gives you a list of tasks your team needs to achieve, and it’s up to you to convince the team in plain English to get the job done.

You don’t have a budget to give your workers a bonus, and they’re not motivated by free pizzas or the foosball table, and you can’t even threaten to fire them. I mean, you can, but they know you can’t really fire them, so that doesn’t motivate them either.

You start to resent the people above you who set the strategy, set the budget, pick your workers, and hand you tasks.

You start to resent the workers below you who get the dopamine rush and don’t obey your orders.

When a company gets into financial trouble, middle managers are among the first ones to get the axe. It’s easy for the executives to say to the higher-level managers, “We’re just going to assign the workers directly to you, and you tell them what you want to do. The middle managers were just in the way anyway. This will be faster and more agile.”

To some extent, they’re right.

Sure, we middle managers will exclaim things like, “But we’re the ones who know how to motivate our staff! We’re the last defense against bad quality products! We’re the ones who enforce best practices so that all of the teams work in the same way!

Management just doesn’t care about that. To them, middle management layers gradually become a cost and a burden.

It’s developers, database administrators, engineers, you name it. (In particular, this post was inspired by Eugene Meidinger’s post about the (alleged) death of Power BI developers.)

I’m seeing the frustration, the anger, and of course, the middle management (tech) job cutbacks. The job market for middle managers is only great during times of economic expansion and company growth, and let’s be honest, that’s not what we have right now.

I wrote this to tell you that you’re not alone.

Some of your coworkers are struggling with these feelings too, so now’s a great time to check in on them. If you need an icebreaker, you can send them this post and say, “Hey, are you feeling like this too?” (I’m not trying to go viral with this post or anything – I don’t give a damn if it gets hits or not, because it’ll reach my regular readers and that’s my only goal anyway.) Your fellow middle managers are good people to hang out with in person, to share the miseries of managing your terrible workers, the burdens of dealing with the managers above you, and celebrating the human connections you still have.