Hah, I suppose I should clarify and say that I certainly wasn’t telling anybody what to do. My job was to track the money-saving ideas that came from design engineers, which basically involved hounding a bunch of people who couldn’t care less about me or my job, and trying to get them to help me. A boss I wasn’t.

But I think I would feel very similarly to Akusu. I’ve never found the task of arranging tasks to be all that creatively fulfilling, although I know others enjoy it very much.

That’s the thing, is that for us a promotion often means an end to our creativity. They say you get promoted to your level of incompetence meaning that if you were a good programmer who enjoyed coming up with effective and/or clever solutions that when you are promoted to management you stop getting to do that. Then you need a whole new skill-set and need to learn to enjoy the more abstract stuff (project planning, laying the framework for other programmers to actually solve the problem) and as much of an ego boost as that can be, it’s not always better to be in charge of people instead of in charge of the solution.

I’d much rather be a coordinator: I work along-side everyone else. I just happen to decide who does what, and if any design issues come up, deal with it by coordinating with those involved.

I think that why this is especially an issue for engineers and programmers — they see doing administrative and managerial things as a step down from their art. And I certainly agree with them! But I think in large % of other job positions, not having to do the daily drudgery of your job, but instead telling other people what to do is considered a promotion.

But definitely — absent any economies of scale, smaller is just flat out better than bigger.

The bureaucracy was suffocating. My job wasn’t to actually be an engineer, it was to set up meetings and keep track of what other engineers were doing. Original thought was not part of my job description, and it sucked. For me, the poor morale engendered by that sort of environment was at least as much a problem as simple organizational inefficiency.