I find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy that you find in most corporate systems than because of anything inherent to the day-to-day job. CEO doesn’t think people lower on the totem pole should be paid more than them, so they hire people at lower income levels. Same for the VPs and the Directors and the layers of middle management until you get down to the ICs.

I mean, just look at comments around this topic whenever it comes up. People want ICs to get paid more because they don't want to work as managers. Heck, I most definitely agree with them - again, I was a manager, and I won't do it again either. That means I have accepted that I'll make less money, but I'm fine with that. Someone else can have that shitty job.

I don't want to clean toilets or man a register either, but people who do those things don't get paid more than me. There's something else going on with how managers get paid.

You don't, and not many people do, but the fact is that there are lots, and lots, and lots of people without the skill sets necessary to move to higher paying jobs, so it's still based on supply and demand. Of course, good managers should generate a lot more value than a janitor or a cashier, so there should be more available to pay them. Even if hardly anyone wanted those janitor or cashier jobs, there would still be a limit on what they could be paid based on value created (and indeed, the "labor shortage" you hear about all the time now in those lower paying jobs is due to the fact that not that many people want them but in many cases company owners can't afford to pay them more).

> Of course, good managers should generate a lot more value than a janitor or a cashier

If I can be excused to ramble a bit...

I think the job is optimization? If so the hypothetical perfect manager would get it right really fast and have nothing to do but wait for the next dumpster fire that might never happen or some micro optimization that isn't worth much.

Measuring performance (at least in real time) seems hard if not impossible?

With a cashier it is easy, if they handle 100 products per minute, 6000 per hour, they get 12 per hour or 0.2 cents per product handled, on the average product it is a perceptional difference of zero. I, as the customer buying 100 products, don't care if I pay 20 cents or 2 euro.

I've had a hundred such jobs, did the math on many, it was spectacularly hilarious. Best one was 5 factory workers making half a million boxes of cookies in a 5 hour shift for 35 euro/day. They could easily pay 1000 euro/day, the customer wouldn't even notice it.

In stead it is really hard for them now, they cant find employees. They are far behind on schedule. Existing employees are made to work even harder.

Being unable to afford to pay more is actually not how it works. You add up what it costs to deliver a service or a product and then you conclude if its a viable business model.

It is not that the rent is to dmn high, parts or ingredients are to expensive, employees are unwilling to work for peanuts etc. There is no limit on how much a janitor costs. The market sets it, employees and employers are just dragged along - kicking and screaming if need be.

If we continue the story and say the employees want to much money we might end up back at their rent being to dmn high.

But surely no one would continue that story to the point where you cant find employees because the cookies got 1 cent more expensive?

I get 2 letters every year, one says my rent goes up by 5%, the other says my salary goes up by 1%. Both talk similarly about inflation. It's quite comical.

I’d say there are many people without the skills to be a top tier engineer. In fact I picked my IC to manager conversions based on their inability to progress as an IC but their empathetic and organizational abilities let them be a credible engineering manager. They weren’t great engineers but they were good enough to know what good work looks like. However the absolute best IC engineers that commanded the most money could easily have been a successful manager but enjoyed IC work more, and were much more valuable making engineering decisions than holding 1:1s and meeting with auditors. They were effectively matrix managers in many respects. That’s a much more rare skill, and you can’t mentor someone into being a top engineer. They’re born, and are born at the same rate as they always have been, and are there for much more rare as the industry and demand has grown.

It's a shitty job for conscientious people. I've seen the toll it has taken on some of them.

People who are lower down on the empathy scale don't have that problem and the fact that this generally makes them worse at the job doesn't reduce their pay.

I also find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy.

You made it much harder on yourself. You should have just fired that one person. But, management.

Definitely said from someone that has never been a manager. FWIW, it's never that easy to fire someone, and it gets even more difficult when you need to worry about protected class issues.

I have been. This is absurd.

You’re claiming that 80% of your time, 80% of your substantial pay, was spent managing the fallout of a single employee on a team of 30. It’s astonishingly inefficient and wasteful.

And while you’re emblematic of this behavior, it’s widespread in the tech industry. The vast majority of management is terrified of any sort of real conflict or intervention, so they become ineffectual and useless.

Best not to make quick assumptions about others.

I'm no manager but if you have a much larger salary and 80% of that money is spend on dealing with a single employee. Even I can figure out what should happen next. I cant imagine a justification for your 20% performance.

That sounds like a company culture issue. Amazon and meta are fairly good at managing out people quickly.

FAANGs generally don't have that problem, at least not until recently.

No shortage of kids at Stanford or MIT dreaming of GOOG bucks and name recognition, and willing to work 80 hour weeks. Hell, even with AMZN's terrible reputation I still know people @ UW Seattle chomping at the bit to get in.

Not hard to fire when it's easy to replace with solid talent. Much harder for someone like P&G or Clorox or Amtrak -- they either contract out or else get what they get.

Would having two managers per 30 people help?

I’m not saying ICs need to make double the pay of their manager. Really, just the tech leads need to make more because then ICs will feel like they have a solid career path outside of management

In any organization somewhere between 1% and 10% of people will suck up 80% of leadership's time if you let them.

Worse, they make the organization toxic for everybody else.

I've come to believe the most important job of a manager is to quickly identify these people and either fire them or neutralize them (i.e. put them in a closet and assign them a meaningless task).

This requires a culture shift in most organizations to understand that toxic people (e.g. bullies, narcissists, and those with other serious personality disorders) have an outsize negative impact on productivity and profits and can kill the company if you don't get rid of them quickly.

I've witnessed this across a few people and across a few companies—both in terms of wasting time for the company, or pushing the company to be better.

There's definitely folks that take all they can get, scream about unnecessary things, and are just general drama, but overall are basically an underperforming IC. (I've even seen one become "best friends" with a director which caused all sorts of chaos and disorganization in the org below them, with the director blissfully unaware because the toxic person was giving side-channel status update to the director outside of the org hierarchy.)

Neutralizing them by giving them unimportant tasks often enables them to be louder elsewhere.

There's also people who are loud because they're trying to make the company better. They'll make you uncomfortable as a manager, and they'll make you have uncomfortable conversations with your leadership. They're...probably the ones to listen to.

True leadership is knowing who to keep close—even if uncomfortable—and who to rapidly manage out.

There is an additional dimension here - some people start off great and then become toxic due to external conditions (home problems, health issues, organizational strife). Sometimes those problems are resolvable (or mitigable). Sometimes your "problem child" becomes a stalwart after their situation is resolved.

A good manager can root cause these issues and then determine if the resolution is workable in a reasonable timeframe. A great manager keeps this in mind while coordinating all activities and requires their direct reports to assist them in doing this.

Finally, great leaders are sometimes not great managers. Another note - even managers can shift from good/great/bad over time.

I fundamentally disagree, as a similarly senior person at various globo mega FAANG corps, my observation of the dynamics is managers are paid more at some companies because managers set compensation and there is a social barrier to paying subordinates more than their managers. At other globo mega FAANG corps you get paid what is required to retain you. Most engineers make less than there managers simply because the managers are more senior in their career and have a lot of options at competitors. But exceptional engineers are wildly rare and in demand breaking the highest pay bands. This also holds for other fields where there’s the two sigma IC who is a rain maker - sales, trading, etc. I’ve never seen a company that’s unable to fill even its most senior ranks readily, but I’ve seen many that can’t retain star traders or sales people or engineers and it’s usually an unwillingness to break the social taboo of “overpaying” an IC. Those companies don’t understand how markets work and generally their competitive performance is lower than the companies that pay what they have to pay.

I’d note shittiness of the job is not a compensation decision factor. Otherwise slaughterhouse employees and social workers would be paid better than any of us.

Working the line at McDonald's is fundamentally harder with respect to being a grind but that doesn't seem to reflect strongly on their pay. The reality is that you don't need to pay $300k/yr for a manager who is also a talented FAANG level developer.

> except for 1 person who just couldn't get along with others

I beleive managers in a situation like this think that layoffs is a kind of God's grace.