In my experience, pay rarely has any kind of correlation to the amount of work being done. I see it merely as a pay for responsibility for the work of those under you or, more succinctly, "being paid to throw yourself under the bus in lieu of anyone you're managing".
I think that's the point, you wouldn't see it. If a good manager gets unreasonably or unfairly reamed by his boss, he's probably not gonna tell his team about it, because it would be a blow to morale. If it was indeed the team's dysfunction, he'd try to improve it.
Meanwhile the most useless people are failing upward into CEO.
It's rare, but it does happen.
Correct. In addition, sometimes advocating for those under you is a sacrificial act, because you're putting your reputation on the line.
It sounds like the management philosophies at our respective orgs are very different.
This very frequently manifests in believing that it is the Lower People who have to do actual work, while your job as a Higher Person is just to make sure they are doing their work (in the simplest way possible—butt in seat == working), and not doing things above their station. Like thinking, or trying to understand why it is that their job, which can be done entirely on any computer with an internet connection, must be done in the office, or questioning why, when the business loses money, the execs still get fat bonuses.
To your point: lazy managers would suffer an accountability hit if something goes wrong with their teams (burnout etc), so that's the incentive for them to manage their teams properly.
No, they should deliver more value.
Best managers I had didn't have that much tasks scheduled. They:
1. Made important decisions right.
2. Processed all incoming requests, both from their reports and from outside, swiftly and with full attention.
3. Had enough psychological stamina to say "no" when it's necessary and defend their team from pressure and anxiety.
None of these things require working a lot of hours. Actually, lazy people are better suited to do it properly.
ha, have you heard of this quote from an officer from the german military? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
It's about efficiency in terms of performance metrics.
Given the number of new grads out of college working 60+ hr weeks, I am not sure there is much leeway left for managers to 'work more'.
With a manager's job, time invested and outcome is even less correlated than a code-monkey (no offense, I am one too) who at least has a slightly-less-than-linear relationship with work/time.
Find yourself a good manager. Don't think too much about how long the manager (or any other coworker) chooses to work. A good manager will find a way to accommodate different lifestyles without disrupting the unity or drive of the individual members of the team.
Someone who does not want to be promoted, and is happy with average rewards will put in different efforts than someone who puts in a lot more and wants to rise up the ranks quickly. Differences in effort and outcome need to be differently rewarded. Not everyone wants to rise up an infinite corporate ladder.
Someone who knows the product inside out and has a great rapport with the team, is worth keeping around. Just don't reward them disproportionally for their contributions.
Somehow, Tech people find a way to be the most stressed out people on a job, while simultaneously working on the least significant part of human lives. No one cares if social media, ads or TV streaming have an incident that last a few extra hours. No one cares if your feature that makes streaming/ads/social-media 5% better releases 2 weeks late.
Legally, your colleague does not have a direct relationship with you. Both you and your colleague have a relationship with the company through your manager, and that's it. If your colleague has a hand-shake agreement for working 30 hours a week for average returns, and you have negotiated a promotion in return for a feature.......then the colleague does not owe you extra work so you get promoted. If your career progression needs others to work more than they've signed up for, then that's the fault of your manager for misallocating funding.
It's at will employment. If your the company doesn't like them, they fire them. The American employment agreement is deeply transactional. You owe only as much to your company as won't get you fired.
It could obviously lead to a problem, if that person is under performing as a result, but it's not obvious that there is a linear relationship between hours worked and performance.
But it seems it's hard to hold management accountable.
For an IC such as an engineer, if you don't deliver code for the deadline or check-in, it's clear you haven't delivered.
But how do you judge the performance of managers? Oh, right, by the size of the "empire"...
Like, yes I write much less code, but I also have to show much more empathy and be able to communicate with different people differently. Helping every engineer on the team advance their careers is tough, because everyone heard feedback differently.
Combine that with the one on ones where someone tells you about how shitty their life has been recently and how that's impacting their work. It's tough to go from roadmap planning to someone crying at you over a medical diagnosis to jumping directly to status updates to telling your boss no. It's an emotional whiplash not present in the engineer world.
Like I said, not harder or easier. Different.
Size of the empire isn't something a manager does, it's a reward senior management gives. This is true unless the company has open allocation, as Google did before it started eating its own corpse.
If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more, I have seen so many people becoming managers just to actually avoid work, or thinking that tech is too hard and too much to study. So they instead go to a whole different area where most of your previous knowledge won't be required anymore, and they don't think that they are starting from zero, so they just don't study and read 2 blog articles and think that they got how is to work with people.