Except that these are normal aspects of their job. Not liking the sight of blood is a normal human response too, but shouldn't be if your career choice is butcher or surgeon.

Yeah, I know a lot of these hit close to home, but on the emails - you've never been a boss.

1 - Get 1300 emails a day (not an exaggeration) - 8 am

2 - Get 50 emails from executives who basically want to fire you OR someone who works for you and you have to act fast to stop the bleeding. - 10 am

3 - Get another 400 emails that are related to an ongoing discussion with managers on your level who are trying to stick your department with more work/blame/responsibility without letting you in on it. React at lightning speed to ward off evil. 2 pm.

4 - Attend many, many meetings in which executives will try to blame you, other managers will try to blame other managers, and long, tedious initiatives are discussed in hushed tones. Fight urge to nod off/strangle people/demand clarity. Pay attention because in six months one of these hapless bastards will claim everyone agreed to something preposterous in the meeting. - takes place: Every available minute. Including lunch, because "that was the only time everyone had available for some reason."

5 - Developer says he CC'd you on several emails related to the XYZ system and is baffled as to why you aren't completely up to date. Don't tell him that at 10 am the CEO was demanding he be fired (from a cannon). 6 pm.

Hmm, while I agree that it can be hard to keep on top of you emails in that kind of volume, if you're a boss, and you're bothered enough about being kept up to date on a project, perhaps some email rules that filter emails about that project into a seperate folder so you can see, quite easily that there are emails about that project, might be a good idea?

I occasionally get similair situations to this at work, which is why I request read receipts. Makes it even more satisfying when an account manager is having a go at you for not emailing them something and you point out they sent you a read receipt for it, they just obviously didn't actually read it. My account managers hate my read receipts :)

What you don't get here (and he didn't really spell it out because I guess it seems obvious once you're in that position) is you don't have time to (nor should you even want to) follow every email thread about every project that you (should, theoretically) already have complete faith that your employee is successfully executing. If you need an update, you just want an update (hey I noticed Bill's getting a little antsy, here's the status of project 127: "status") not to find and trace back through a discussion of x y and z aspects of implementation or marketing or whatever.

Bingo - you have to trust that the people working for you know what they are doing. This means going to meetings and being belligerent with other managers at times as they try to claim your people are screwing everything up, without even checking with your people. You always defend first, never call anyone out by name and never let any other manager talk derogatorily about your employees. Part of your job is to protect the people who aren't there to defend themselves.

This also means that if your developers drop the ball, you're screwed. You can't possibly know if someone is sticking bugs in the code as they race for a deadline, but when the system misses deadline because of it, guess who's responsible?

Doesn't help when you stick up for a dev for weeks or months and then they burn you by introducing shoddy code or not testing thoroughly, and their response is 'well I sent you a bunch of read receipt emails, so those browser bugs I introduced aren't my fault - you should be paying attention'.

This experience is why I work so hard to back up my boss or lead when I'm just a developer on a project.

> If you need an update, you just want an update (hey I noticed Bill's getting a little antsy, here's the status of project 127: "status")

Sounds like every project just needs the equivalent of a Twitter feed. "Status: everything's goin' smooth."

These could then be correlated, perhaps, into a dashboard of some sort. ;)

2000 emails a day sounds like a profound lack of organization. What kind of company is this?

I like how you feel you protected the developer even while he was criticizing you for not doing any real work. That sums up a lot of big co. work relationships.

That sounds like a complete and utter nightmare.

This is why I am a developer for life.

I dislike parts of javascript and moan about it, doesn't mean I shouldn't be a programmer.

I've been a manager before and didn't have constant meetings. Most decisions actually get made in hallways or between a couple of you casually chatting after everyone else has gone home in my experience. I avoided meetings when I feasibly could and tacitly approved of the same attitude in my team too.

False equivocation. Not liking parts of javascript is a different concept than being a doctor or a nurse and not be able to be around blood.

He was talking about managers and meetings, not nurses and blood.

This! I wouldn't want to hear my doctor complain that surgery is icky or that listening to people talk about their aches and pains is tedious. Managers complaining about management tasks is not good. All of the managers I've had were once engineers. For a couple of them it was all too obvious that they still much preferred engineering work over management work, and they were not the best managers I've had, to say the least.

The problem is that you think meetings totally go with the "boss" title.

But one can imagine a totally competent boss that HATES meetings and tries to have as few of them as possible to get the job done.

Well, of course, that would change the meaning. He can be so terse with words because many of us can fill in the blanks that these bosses have the wrong attitude about things.