A lot of less experienced employees don’t understand what managers do. There is also a certain personality I’d call “the geeky engineer” who thinks the same way.
Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example need micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to make sure they don’t go off track, get stuck without telling anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first week playing with something speculative that may help).
A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don’t mean that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily.
Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for career growth. This is also true of ICs though.
Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad EMs.
a) a bad employee who you should not try to micro manage to make effective but should just replace with a better employee
or
b) unaware of the context around the task and does not have aligned motivations with others to get this done quickly
If b - then a good manager should do a better job of figuring out how to develop the intrinsic motivation of the employee and find ways to align the incentives and motivations of management and employees better.
Trying to micro-manage to avoid employees doing things you don't want is putting a band-aid on the problem. In fact it's even worse because you're creating a bad work environment that will attract more sub-par employees who accept micro-management and will scare away the high-performing employees you so desperately desire. Eventually you have a bunch of micro-managing managers who themselves are being micro-managed and your company bloats to several multiples in size of what is actually required and efficiency is spiraling out of control.
I think it should be applied on a case by case basis when necessary, and I’ve seen effective managers do this in the past. Anyway, the type of employee who requires this treatment often is precisely the one that least enjoys it, which is my original point.
From my vantage point as an engineer it also seems like what qualifies as "good management" is hard to pin down because not only is it difficult to quantify in the first place, but it also varies between teams and organizations… a management style that worked in one team and company might fly like a rock elsewhere. If that's true, it'd make vetting managers challenging even if the business in question is trying to vet them as well as they do engineers.
My pitch for a the ideal corporate structure: bring back the secretaries. Re-introduce the division between your secretarial work and your managerial work, and shrink the number of managers by a significant fraction. Ideally, the result is A) fewer managers means more budget for hiring better mangers B) less secretarial work among your ICs and managers boosting both productivity and job satisfaction C) flatter management hierarchy means less information loss between ICs and the top decision makers and D) the people doing secretarial work no longer have the power to shunt that work off onto the ICs.
> 2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid relative to the IC's who "Do the work."
> These two ideas, though, are in contradiction
I don't see them in contradiction. They're also neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive. They are separate observations and both may be valid or invalid for a given set of management.
I happen to think that there's a lot of good "management" but not a lot of good executive teams. Sure there's definitely a lot of bad management too, but IMO there's a far bigger pie taken from poor (or outright employee-hostile) C- or S-level executives.
1) Poor management (broadly defined) creates misaligned incentives, busy work, etc. that "gets in the way" of good talent executing well.
2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid relative to the IC's who "Do the work."
These two ideas, though, are in contradiction. Management deserves higher pay exactly because poor management can destroy value so quickly and easily. The problem is identifying, within the "company system," good management from bad management.