It’s a sad truth of the modern workplace that in many companies and institutions there are people with stable jobs whose value to the company is not obvious to anyone except the person who keeps signing their paychecks. Maybe the position is traditional (”but we’ve always had an assistant to the sub-regional dispatch coordinator!”) Maybe it’s redundant and the person in the position is just really good at pretending to have work to do. Maybe it’s not worthless in the strictest sense of the word but it only shows meaningful productivity in brief, irregular spurts (like a retail shopping mall giving an office, email address, and computer to the guy who plays Santa, the Easter Bunny, Uncle Sam, and occasionally the walking billboard.)

At any rate, here are some qualifiers I came up with.

1. How many people notice if you’re late for work? How many people notice if you leave early or take a 2 hour lunch? If you had a heart attack on the toilet, how long would it be before someone came in to check on you? (ignore that last question if you’re the only man working at a company of all women or vice versa.)
2. If you call in sick, how many phone calls do you get during the day from work?
3. How many people do you have to coordinate with when you take a vacation? Can your workload be taken over by 1 person? Do you have to split it up between 2 or more people? Can your entire agenda simply wait until you get back?

I’m going to break there to raise the point that I applied these criteria to myself and everyone at my work and concluded that pretty much half of the management here is completely and utterly worthless. I’ve gone through periods of worthlessness myself but things have picked up lately. I consider myself to be middle management and two months ago I had so little to do that I was totally worthless.

I see two types of managers in the world. I’m sure there are gray areas but I only see two:

First you have the manager who loves the fact that he or she has risen to the point where they can manage. Second, you have the manager who still loves doing what they rose through the ranks doing but they accepted management as a token of recognition for their seniority.

At every company I’ve ever worked for, the former made up the vast majority of the worthless people. At my current job we have people who I know still work here but I haven’t seen them in the halls or in the parking lot in months. MONTHS. They arrive very early in the morning (or do they? Nobody else is here at 6:30am to verify their actual arrival time) and they leave before me and the other scientists.

I identify the best employees and managers around here as the ones who have management duties but still spend most of their time in a lab coat doing actual science. Maybe at your job you have a sales manager who still goes out on calls. Maybe there’s a project manager who still plays with the software code on top of his management duties. I’m pretty sheltered when it comes to other occupations so I struggle to think of more examples. How much productive would this country be if we had fewer people content to sit on their ass and simply keep their job every year?

I’m currently contributing to my own worthlessness by writing this at work. I’m sure I’ll revisit this in the future.