I'm retiring due to health reasons. AMA

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by GloryDayz

In an "employees" market I agree, but the tide will shift. Bit even then I was very clear that management is exactly that, management. Treat everybody with respect and equality, make performance expectations very clear and very transparent, get signatures on documents that show they've read and discussed the expectations, document/document/document (the one thing that kills a manager's chance of removing a bad employee), and than follow up with little emotion. I agree that the HR folks sometimes seem to be as much of a challenge as any problematic employees that the DEI process places on you, or the RA process assigns to you, but HR has managers too - get to know them well.

I was very lucky across my time working my way up from engineer, to lead engineer (non-supervisory team lead), to supervisor, to department head, so senior leadership because of the nature of my work. We had the occasional bad apple make their way into our ranks, but knowing the rules and how the game is played, and playing that game from the very beginning, really helped us when we needed to remove an employee who couldn't hack the kind of work that network engineers have to do.

That said, I LOVE being retired and I don't miss I.T. even a little bit...

you sound like a hard ass boss.
I loved my freedom most of my career. I had to produce, give progress updates to management and the C-suites but most times they just left me alone to go do my thing. I always brought it home on time.

[GloryDayz]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

you sound like a hard ass boss.
I loved my freedom most of my career. I had to produce, give progress updates to management and the C-suites but most times they just left me alone to go do my thing. I always brought it home on time.

Detail oriented and hard-ass aren't the same. The biggest challenge for engineers becoming leaders (beyond team leads) is the understanding of things that math can't define. The math formula called "HR" is one of those inexplicable things, and most engineers suffer for a while before they realize that you can't deal with the HR problem with simple physics and higher education, it's an enigma, you have to feed the beast that drools stupid and learn to tame that flea-infested beast. HR doesn't get logic, they get emotion, saving money on staff, and agendas (and staff reduction), so you have to deal with their BoD-directed reerunation without consulting the time honored text books that were used at university.