I could be described as a mid-level manager, with all of the desk-jockey pencil pushing that that entails. However, within that hierarchy i manage projects for clients, so there is more mental stimualtion than simply feeding information up and down a food chain. And honestly, nearly everyone I work with is awesome, or almost awesome. It's an office primarily staffed by engineers and scientists. These folks are all highly educated, capable, and personable. Most of them have very interesting hobbies and pursuits outside the workplace, making for good conversation. They fish, hike, camp, home brew, run iron man triathlons, collect fine bourbon, soil, travel around the world, distill their own booze, are well-read, and many have excellent culinary taste. These people are one of the main reasons I've worked here for 20 years.
As I've mentioned 100 times, I work with an ad agency. I work as an Account Executive, Client Services guy. My job is 100% reliant on my creatives to actually make the ads. They typically are art school majors (think of everything that comes with that) being paid to and told to push all their art to sell __________ in a corporate structure. If you're lucky you'll end up with A) the ones who understand the financial realities of life, express their artistry outside of work as well, but show up to work to do their jobs. You'll also be unlucky and end up with B) actual wanna be artists who can't cut it, therefor ending up in an agency. Worst worst case scenario, you could end up with C) scatterbrained people that just know how to use Adobe Creative Suite and/or write better than a 7th grader. I've worked with a team of 1 of each above and it's been a huge pain in my ass. Creatives are like uncooperative cats where it is hard to win. An assignment comes in and its very similar to another assignment, so its positioned that way so they don't have to a ton of work. They get upset because we're not giving them enough creative freedom to come up with cool ideas. Next assignment comes in you loosen up the reigns so they can go at it, they don't have enough time, information, structure, want to build a robot and need triple the client's budget. Just this week I sent a quicky assignment out because on our client's website, the image chosen was making the font on top of it hard to read. Now this image has been on the website and approved by the client for...um...6 months now. Just need the image slightly darkened so the text can be read or have a drop shadow placed in. Two things happens. First the Creative sends me back an image that's different saying "This is what it was supposed to be, so here you go." Text is harder to read of course. Then the web guy takes it and just tosses it up on the live site. Not a staging site, just tosses it on the live fucking site. I just send an email back, asking everyone "Does this look easier to read to you?" I then have to wait another 30 minutes past deadline for them to get me the right image.