All good officers respect their good NCOs, and listen respectfully to anything a senior NCO tells them.
It's still usually better as an officer in my opinion
Not that there is less BS to deal with, it's just that the BS gets front-loaded and compressed into the length of your commissioning source training (a few months for OCS, a few weeks for ROTC, a couple of years for Academy) while the BS on the enlisted side can last several years depending on your career field. And the BS has a different "flavor" as an officer.
Plus, as an officer especially in operations, you often get to choose your own duty hours once you've proven yourself capable of handling your job. As even a low-level supervisor (junior captain), I only rarely had to sit rigid "office hours". Then again, I have also spent up to a couple of years at a time alternating 5am and 11am show times every other week, plus at least one working weekend a month. We *try* to keep from yanking around our enlisted troops' schedules like that, if possible, while the officers get crapped on if they complain too much about the goofy hours. And oh yea, 10-12 hr days are pretty much standard for officers in operational career fields, while once again we *try* to manage the enlisted force to not make them work stupidly long hours plus weekends.
So both officer and enlisted have drawbacks, but I still think it's a "better" experience as an officer. More flexibility and freedom to determine the course of your career and even daily schedule, at the cost of occasionally having to choose for yourself to work 18+ hr days even when you could probably get by with less. I'm not saying that enlisted troops don't work long hours too, and some of the crummiest schedules are held by parts of our enlisted forces, but again both senior NCOs and officers *try* to protect enlisted troops from the stupid schedules, while even the most junior officer has to figure that stuff out for themselves or suck it up and work the long duty day. Sometimes the additional responsibility and authority means nothing but an opportunity to send your folks home for the night while you stay at work grinding away at the crisis of the day. And that's the same for officers and senior NCOs.
Again, still, I prefer the officer side, because it's rare for even a junior officer to be told to hold to an exact schedule and do exact duties. That's totally normal for an enlisted troop for the first several years of their career... Gotta live on base, dorm inspections, strict duty hours plus supervised study times and testing up to the next level, etc etc. But a junior officer gets a little more flexibility right away. While the Lt's job is often to keep the enlisted troops that actually do all the work happy and productive, he's not forced to live in the dorms and doesn't get restricted to base if he shows up a few minutes late to work. He just gets creamed by his commander if his work isn't done right or if he doesn't treat his people properly. I'll take that responsibility over having my life micromanaged, because early on I decided I'd had enough of the rigid military lifestyle and really liked being able to set my own pace and leadership style. As long as I get my job done and nobody thinks I'm crazy enough to need extra supervision, I can do whatever the heck I want. That's led to being the last guy out of the building every night for months at a time, but nobody yells at me for having a messy dorm room either.
Oh yea, the pay is generally better too. Anyone who stays in the military just for the money is probably in the service for the wrong reasons, but the extra pay sure doesn't hurt. Consider it compensation for the ulcers.
