I'm a Middle Manager Who Gets Paid to Do Nothing

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

My first job was not in an office, and it was for minimum pay. I was making Є17,000 or Є18,000 a year. I did that for about a year or two, and then I moved on to my first office job, which is essentially doing what my employees do now. I was one of the first 30 employees at that company, so I got a promotion in less than a year.

Everyone I started with is now some sort of manager, because we all had the most experience and kept moving up. I got another promotion, then I got head-hunted by another company that was starting a new branch in my city, and started as a middle manager there. I was the youngest manager in the company’s history. Eventually I moved on from there, and I’ve been in my current management role for three years.

I’m now in my early thirties, and I know that very little of my success is me being so great—it’s almost purely happenstance. I'm that classic case of having "failed upwards" throughout my career. Sometimes I think about the fact that I was always the one getting my hands dirty, doing the work, and now I'm just managing managers. Even the people directly below me aren't doing the actual work itself. I basically sit around reading Reddit and browsing the internet. I sit around in meetings with shareholders and board members and report on the work my staff do, and get congratulated on it as if I had anything to do with it.

I feel like a bit of a fraud: I have no marketable skills, my degree is a useless arts degree, and my career is all based on just sticking around until my bosses are like “Well, I guess we should promote this guy, he has x years of experience.” I know I’m just not working as hard as I'm being paid for and it does make me feel a lot of guilt. 

I even asked when I first got hired at my current job, “Will I be able to help out with any of the work?” And the CEO said, “There’s no point. That's not your job. Your job is to make sure they're doing the work.” That felt icky. I didn't like that. But I’ve stayed because they're paying me well, maybe the top 10% of salaries in my country, and it's an easy gig. I would have to be a fool to turn it down. 

I haven't told anyone how I feel, because what are they going to say? Don't look a gifthorse in the mouth? Or, I wish I had that gig. Or, You’re so lucky. And this is not a situation where I’ve gotten lost in the corporate structure and nobody notices I’m not doing work. I’m fulfilling the job description which is probably broad like, “willing to run a team, willing to be part of a dynamic workforce.” It feels wrong for me to be telling people to work and then sitting back and being like, “Well, my job is done.” I know this is generally how it works—work hard in your twenties so you don’t have to work as hard as a manager—but it feels unfair. It feels like a topsy turvy system.