Re:Why Walmart pays its truck drivers 6 figures
by rightbyte on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @09:43AM
(#39190615)
> Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.
I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.
Re:Why Walmart pays its truck drivers 6 figures
by ethbr1 on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @11:50AM
(#39192338)
I'm also suspicious it actually transfers to engineering orgs, especially with managers who don't have architect senses (or intuition).
But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.
Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.
FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference.
Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable.
And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.