It's not just the output of their team; compared to people like Bellard (and John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Peter Norvig, ...), 99.99% of people are mediocre. Increasing the output of 100 mediocre people by 20%-30% is worth more than contributing one person's output, even if it's 10x or 20x.

And I would argue the difference between a mediocre manager and a good manager is more than that.

But... the Peter Principle?

You seem to be assuming that there is an equivalence between good programmers and good managers?

I wish I lived in this alternative reality you describe. My career has been littered where non technical managers--essentially clerks--get paid more than I do to sit around with a others and talk about what should be done while I (and colleagues) do all the doing. I end up doing a LOT of "managing" from behind the lines in all these cases.

Frankly, the reality distortion field where "a good manager has increased the output of their team" has been such a small observed sample, that I wouldn't be able to claim there was even a correlation between the two, much less causality; I'd just chalk it up to something like "the water" or "the lighting" if I saw it happening with any regularity.

(QuickJS seems tres cool; hat tip to the author)

> Because good managers are hard to come by so you have to give some sort of incentive to attract and retain the good ones.

That's a nice economics just-so story. But do people think that the median manager is effective? I'd say less than half of my managers have been effective. Some of them even got promoted.

Plus good managers who were top notch contributors grow the next generation of top notch contributors.

Exactly, in my experience of open source so far, the biggest difference from a good project to a great project is management - even as simple as just keeping track of PRs.

If you make a PR and it gets left to die after a few days, who cares? If someone keeps an eye on it and tells you what they're looking for with a smile, you're going to try and get it done.