Thursday, February 20, 2014

A Day at Work

We don't look like this, but this is me, the ops manager and a line pilot.

Be strong out there. Never become a management pilot, unless you aspire to spend more time discussing how to get other pilots to do things than you do flying.

5 comments:

PatG said...

This is true for any management position.
This is why I'm not a manager: I like doing things ;-)

Dan in ALB said...

Yes, an unfortunate consequence of advancement. You can't get the boss to pay you more to do the same stuff that you had been doing all along

majroj said...

This is why it's hard to transition to management or leadership where you worked your way up.

Being right about the job goes from "Good one, Av!", to "Dang, that Av keeps trying to bust my cojones!".

The cartoon reminds me of kids trying to whipsaw Mom against Dad and vice versa.

majroj said...

PS: I was lured into the basicinstructions.net website by that cartoon.

Now I have one more internet guilty pleasure.

Thanks!

david said...

I'm much more sympathetic towards management than I used to be. It's more fun to have the privilege of focussing on a small set of well-defined problems (fly from point A to B, write a CSS stylesheet, build a deck), but someone had to define those problems for you, figure out how them fit in with other problems other people were solving, arrange funding, hire staff, and (as in Aviatrix's case) ensure compliance with various regs, etc. Also, it's more fun to have a "stupid manager" to blame than it is being the manager taking the blame, but someone has to actually make the decisions (good or bad) and take the flak.

If managers seem stupid, sometimes they are, but most of the time it's just that they have to track a lot more things, so they can't devote all their attention to what you're doing (just as parents seem stupid to kids because they haven't had time to learn all the Pokemon names).