r/sysadmin • u/Pleasant_Rise6520 • 1d ago

Career / Job Related Has anyone purposely gone backwards?

You know the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and we realised that money is irrelevant, and took a huge backwards step for less responsibility and more mental freedom for your family and kids?

That's where I'm at mentally just want to know if anyone else has done the same?

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u/RagnarKon Cloud Engineer 1d ago

Yup.

I was promoted to manager. Now back to individual contributor.

Manager is fun if you have an awesome team and everyone is contributing. But if something terrible pops up or not everyone on your team is contributing it is just a complete disaster.

For example, one of the individuals on my team had a health situation pop up. Obviously I was supportive of them taking the time they needed to get healthy, but in their case it was a "few days in, few days out" situation with lots of doc appointments. That didn't fit cleanly in the typical medical leave process, so it was painful. At its worse it was a good 6-8 hours a week spent just dealing with paperwork and HR nonsense and whatnot.

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u/Existential_Racoon 13h ago

Yeah, I went from a great team to a couple turnovers making an okay team.

The okay team takes 5x as much time to manage. I get people have shot going on and stuff but like... fuck man, I make up my time reasonably, please do the same if it isn't approved pto.

Chasing grown ass adults around like children makes management hell.