chapotraphouse

Middle management is a scam and it hurts the soul.

You get a pay bump of, what 50 cents? A dollar or two? And for your trouble you get a whole lot more stress and you quickly find whatever pay increase you get is gobbled up because the buck stops with you and you are often stuck working back in crisis situations.

You also end up as the hatchet man, having to deliver whatever mahogany row decides would be the best way to squeeze customers or clients for dollars while making the work harder for employees, and often there's the expectation that you should resort to coercion and underhanded tactics.

Management roles are good if you want to do union organising, if you want to get dirt on the company (just a tip - those two are absolutely not mutually-exclusive btw), or if you have the right leadership skillset and you are critical to the function of the business such that you're able to swing your weight around and sorta gatekeep what the higher-ups think they're going to be able to impose on the staff or the team. But that takes a particular sort of person and it demands a lot of assertiveness, plus if you're not the kind of person who has a lot of credentials or industry contacts then you're probably going to bring down a whole lot of financial stress upon yourself when some higher-up takes a strong dislike to you and decides to fuck with you.

There are some reasonable management roles out there but those tend to be the exception to this rule imo.