How Often Have You Seen Mostly or 100% AWOL Managers?

It is about being checked out.<p>I am in 50s. I rode a late state startup to IPO and back to PE with a an exit soon. I have got kids to put through college and a parent to be taken care of. I saw nepokids be handed, HANDED , a company they had no business running. So yes I am grabbing what I can.

Stop pretending that companies care if you spend 40 hours or if you do 80% of the work. The majority of the time they look at you as a cost per unit and make decisions based on that.<p>I just saw the best lead java developers be laid off after 20 years with the product because he was overpaid salary wise when compared to 10 other contractors from India. All that tribal knowledge is gone and never coming back. Mind you this person could run laps around all 10 of these contractors but corporate America only cares about vanity metrics and looks at employees as cogs in a machine.

Oh, man, I was hoping this thread would be about managers who have mastered the art of time management and are doing their jobs in a few hours per week.<p>One of my old managers had it. I would rarely see the dude -- except for once or twice a month, when we&#x27;d happen to be in the same meeting. He&#x27;d wait until the last bit of the meeting, and then he&#x27;d come in -- calm and measured -- with a comment that would blow everyone away. While everyone was nodding at what a good point it was, he&#x27;d disappear, never to be seen again until next quarter.<p>Meanwhile, I&#x27;m over here working a steady 50 hours&#x2F;week and barely keeping up. Most weeks are wall-to-wall meetings, combined with a few over-caffeinated nights writing up some doc or another, and then it&#x27;s a stumble into the weekend with just enough time to recover and start the whole thing over on Monday.<p>I&#x27;d like to hear from <i>those</i> kinds of AWOL managers. I have no idea how they do it.

I’ve never encountered this. I’ve had managers who were promoted into incompetence, but they were still present and doing their best. I can’t imagine how someone would keep their job if they weren’t doing it… The teams I’ve worked on would almost all express concern to their manager’s manager that they weren’t getting the structure, support, and direction they need from their manager. It couldn’t last long.

AWOL as in they don&#x27;t come in at all, or AWOL as in they don&#x27;t produce any noticeable artifacts or effect on your personal or team output?<p>I manage a team and we have a return to office policy that I&#x27;m waiting to be reprimanded for not following before I actually come in, but I also don&#x27;t hold my people to any standard beyond what I&#x27;m willing to do. I couldn&#x27;t imagine ordering them to go in and not doing so myself.

I had a boss once who was hoarding projects to manage - he wanted to have fingers in all possible pies.<p>As a result, he basically spent most of his time in transit between meetings (not even in the meetings themselves...).<p>If it sounds great, it wasn&#x27;t. He was notionally in charge of ~50 projects or so and a blocker on each one. Nothing definitive could be done without his approval, which was hard, as he wasn&#x27;t even au fait with the project&#x27;s status. So to get anything done you had to (a) physically find him and pin him down, (b) explain what approval he needs to give and why, (c) let him go to think about it, and (d) repeat every few days until he makes a decision (or lets you make it instead).<p>His desk was flanked by two piles of &quot;in-tray&quot; papers about a foot tall, from earlier years when people thought leaving reports and forms on his desk was a way to get them in his job queue. Alas, he basically never sat at his desk, and when he did, he just peeked at the flanked screen with no sense of irony.

I had a manager who I didn&#x27;t see (digitally or in person) for 3 months at a stretch, and he was one of the best I ever had.<p>Small company that used to be bigger and we needed to finalize a migration that&#x27;d been in progress for like 7 years. It kept being delayed by leadership who&#x27;d get distracted, so the final 20% would never get done, we&#x27;d build more tech debt, and then the 20% turned into 23%. We&#x27;d argue to pay down the debt, get 1.5 weeks to tackle it, get it down to 20% remaining again and then delay for another couple months. Repeat this for years and you have a treading water situation for years.<p>This manager got hired, saw this was holding the company back (spend too high since 2 systems of infra and 2 places to wrangle features) and lobbied hard to finish it off. Said it&#x27;ll take 7 months but we&#x27;d cut our spend by like 30%. Leadership agreed. Manager kicked off the project and then just disappeared.<p>Leadership then got distracted and wanted new things. Manager would re-appear for discussions EXCLUSIVELY with leadership, convince them to stay the course, and then disappear again. This happened repeatedly, probably every couple weeks, but he only interacted with leadership, firewalling us from them.<p>This manager had probably 3 meetings total with us the team over the course of the project because he trusted us to carry it out. Each meeting was him saying, &quot;it looks like you&#x27;re all making great progress, let&#x27;s keep it that way.&quot; Then disappear again.<p>We had two of those meetings after the start meeting, and the final meeting at month 7 was &quot;hooray, you did it, everything&#x27;s implemented, all traffic&#x27;s migrated, all error rates are well within tolerances, and we&#x27;ve turned off the old machines, saving us loads of money. Congratulations! Here&#x27;s a nice gift and a bonus, let&#x27;s celebrate!&quot;<p>We did, and then not long after he left for greener pastures. Leadership loved him, the team loves him, but he saw his time had come. Love you Ahti, you were probably the best manager I ever had!

Anecdotally, the idea of a career is dying among many I know. People just want the money.<p>So some of it is probably being Overemployed. I have a job where I am just doing the minimum to keep it.<p>Some of it is just waiting to be fired while their build their own businesses.

Why would I care about my manager not being in the office? We probably don&#x27;t share a continent anyway.<p>On the other hand, sometimes it is culture. I had manager that had 100+ direct reports. He never had 1x1 and barely managed to get all of the payrol&#x2F;timesheet&#x2F;pto aprovals on time.

I&#x27;ve had a few AWOL managers, but in each case they had another team as well. They spend all their time on the other team and expect the team I&#x27;m on to run itself. So they aren&#x27;t AWOL from the company, they just have 0 presence in my work life.

Wow. This is not just me who’s seen this? This is a phenomenon. Brilliant. Explains a lot about some of my managers.

Yeah I’ve seen that before many times and usually they’re moonlighting. So it’s not career immolation necessarily, it’s more like double dipping.

Looks like a silent quitting schema. I&#x27;d prefer absent boss than someone that micromanage what I&#x27;m doing.

My manager&#x27;s great. Their manager can&#x27;t even be assed to tell my manager when they leave for vacation.

I wish my manager went AWOL. Would certainly increase my productivity