Why can't managers come up with a better counterargument other than ad-hominem most of the times when their relevance is challenged - aww you've only had bad managers. you must be new grad to not understand the importance of managers.
No matter how much you like to justify the importance of your role, that doesn't change all the fundamental facts about your role.
Based on your tone and the way you drive the conversation, I wouldn't be surprised if you are one of those narcissistic managers who think they are people leaders and think you are doing something important, while your reports probably think you are just a useless middleman, but can't voice it because of the power you hold over their career - which is the unfortunate reality.
If you think managers are not the primary contributing factor to the mental health issues and the general unhappiness in the workplace, this goes to reinforce the argument that managers are generally tone-deaf. why else would engineers be unhappy unless they get interrupted by sporadic status update requests and their times wasted by useless scrum meetings and 1-1s that managers like you likely are drawn to.
No matter how highly you think of your role and how much you think your role is relevant, that doesn't change the fact that if your ICs leave the company, it's most likely going to be because of you.
Everything you listed can be done by TLs and can be absorbed by ICs in a holacratic model. if that's all you do, then you are indeed an overpaid useless status update tool bot & message filtering system at best, and a human scarecrow at worst. it's likely that the company can hire store managers from Target and with a little bit of ramp-up they can pretty much do everything your role entails - managing out, asking for status updates, hiring, and delegating scoping and mentoring work to the TLs, sitting in useless meetings all day (and calling it alignment, scoping, and fighting fires and shielding the ICs from politics to feel more relevant about yourself, not acknowledging that shit buffering and politicking exist because managers and modern corporate hierarchy exist)
no wonder more and more people are thinking managers are useless if this is the best argument you can come up with. I genuinely hope better people processes and collab tools will make your kind obsolete soon.
No matter how much you like to justify the importance of your role, that doesn't change all the fundamental facts about your role.
Based on your tone and the way you drive the conversation, I wouldn't be surprised if you are one of those narcissistic managers who think they are people leaders and think you are doing something important, while your reports probably think you are just a useless middleman, but can't voice it because of the power you hold over their career - which is the unfortunate reality.
If you think managers are not the primary contributing factor to the mental health issues and the general unhappiness in the workplace, this goes to reinforce the argument that managers are generally tone-deaf. why else would engineers be unhappy unless they get interrupted by sporadic status update requests and their times wasted by useless scrum meetings and 1-1s that managers like you likely are drawn to.
No matter how highly you think of your role and how much you think your role is relevant, that doesn't change the fact that if your ICs leave the company, it's most likely going to be because of you.
Everything you listed can be done by TLs and can be absorbed by ICs in a holacratic model. if that's all you do, then you are indeed an overpaid useless status update tool bot & message filtering system at best, and a human scarecrow at worst. it's likely that the company can hire store managers from Target and with a little bit of ramp-up they can pretty much do everything your role entails - managing out, asking for status updates, hiring, and delegating scoping and mentoring work to the TLs, sitting in useless meetings all day (and calling it alignment, scoping, and fighting fires and shielding the ICs from politics to feel more relevant about yourself, not acknowledging that shit buffering and politicking exist because managers and modern corporate hierarchy exist)
no wonder more and more people are thinking managers are useless if this is the best argument you can come up with. I genuinely hope better people processes and collab tools will make your kind obsolete soon.