How does it work for a 10 people team for instance ?

One of them will be a team leader at some point. A second one might follow and become a team leader while the firth one goes higher.

Will they go up one more level ? let’s say yes. That makes e of them climbing the ladder.

Will there be a fourth ? probably not. That leaves 6 people not going up, and only earning marginally more. That’s less than half will see significant change in their 10 yers next.

> How does it work for a 10 people team for instance ?

Large organization graphs are shaped like pyramids, but the thing about a pyramid is that the combination of the top and the middle is as big as the bottom. The organizations large enough for unions to come into play have multiple layers of middle management.

But let's suppose the company is less than 50% managers. That still doesn't mean the typical person won't ever be a manager, it only means they're an employee for more time than they are a manager.

Also remember that small businesses employ the most people and don't have that sort of tree structure. In that case you typically have the owner and the apprentice who is expected to buy out the owner when they retire and ten person teams are not a thing. And you will often have some workers in larger organizations who don't move into management in the same company they started in but who do leave to strike out on their own, i.e. become a founder/manager of a new small business once they have sufficient industry experience.

This seems okay to me. What’s wrong with this? Not everyone deserves further compensation. And others value the work of these employees only so much, so rewards have to be distributed either those bounds.

Extremely common from the perspective of HN commentators but not actually extremely common in reality.

Most people do not have a managerial position their entire lives - period.

Actually extremely common in reality. If you're a landscaper, you don't typically go from there to being the CEO of Facebook, but after a few years you may end up in a supervisory position managing other workers. Or you save up enough money for a down payment on some equipment to start your own landscaping company.

There are indeed people who stay in dead end jobs indefinitely, but such people are not the majority of people.

The most common jobs in the US are largely, indeed, roles that would call “dead-end jobs”:

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_char...

What makes you think most of those have no career path? The number one, Retail Salespersons, have the obvious path into becoming sales managers for the local office, then the region etc. Even fast food workers can become the store manager.

And those jobs often have less competition for those management positions because they're so often held by college students who go on to jobs in the industry they've studied rather than competing with other salespersons or fast food workers for the office manager position.