Many engineers are far more valuable than their managers
ifsecglobal.com
ifsecglobal.com
Management really should be equal in pay and prestige as to a project manager or senior HR person, but instead they end up being seen as higher up the hierarchy and privy to information on what is happening behind the scenes, until they eventually communicate that down to the engineering teams beneath them.
You can crap on managers all you want, but a big chunk of their job is soul-crushing work that most engineers wouldn't touch with 10 foot poles.
With that said, it doesn't have to be one or the other. There are IT managers that are highly effective as people manager and are technical. They are rare breeds, yet they're paid the same as managers that are not very technical.
By the time they get recognized and promoted, they're saddled with too big a team and responsibilities that their technical skill is no longer of much use.
They recommend pay drop in the article as a solution, but nobody really wants that, despite the fact that it would often be meritocratic. I think human societies ultimately do not want meritocracy too much.
Always be true to your skills. Know what you're worth and go out and get what you're worth - I learned that from watching Rocky.
Being a manager is really a unique skill in and of itself, which is why so many managers aren't that great -- especially when they were promoted from the position they go on to manage (see the Peter Principle [0]).
Let's say there is some job (like engineering) that society considers valuable. So the people, who do it, can be proud, because they are doing what is considered to be a valuable job. Then free market can deal with the situation in two ways:
- These people are valuable, so they should be paid more.
- These people already intrinsically prefer doing work they consider valuable, so they can be paid less.
So you see, it's perfectly symmetric; free market cannot enforce any sort of moral values that people already don't have. That's why it cannot be meritocratic, unless the underlying society is.
And in current U.S., the underlying morality is very much based on hierarchy in companies, which actually seems to be pretty default human behavior.
It's that people have been conditioned to see the first option when they learn about free markets and not the second option.
But then they open themselves to supply/demand of the market, and the risk of being short-staffed (the risk of being unemployed might not be as great, because a business may be in active competition, and lose opportunities). Plus, I imagine the overhead of new staff bites too; and it's not common to under-pay new staff in their probationary period.
But my original point was; An Engineer who enjoys their work can avoid being paid less simply because of this fact.
> An Engineer who enjoys their work can avoid being paid less simply because of this fact.
I think he can provided that he either:
- Works for someone who is not a psychopath but a decent human being, that is, not being entirely rational in the economic sense.
- Hides the fact that he enjoys it and would probably do it even for less money from the employer. (But this eventually transpires through salary raises or their absence.)
Note that either of those assumptions is breaking the assumptions of the rational decision-making in the free market.
I think people within the profession can do that to an extent, but for the whole profession (or a subset) it's much harder.
So for example, game programmers are paid less than typical programmers, because they are enjoying it more. And programmers (software engineers) are paid less than managers because again, on average, they enjoy the job more. Or look at a typical teacher or scientist.
I actually think companies should even be concerned about "gaining a good manager, losing a good engineer."
There's this notion that it's better to be a good engineer than a bad manager, and that wage ceilings that force engineers to become managers even if they aren't good at it are harmful. This, I agree with. But you know, I actually thing there may be harm even if the engineer is a good manager. Truth is, in many instances a top engineer is harder to find, harder to develop, and creates more wealth than a top manager. In short, if someone is really good at both, even then you might be better off leaving that person in engineering.
Usually the very best engineers do end up as leaders of sorts. However, these engineers tend to lead loose and informal groups of other talented people, often coordinating complicated work that requires deep understanding of the technology and domain. They often resist the "management" title, and they are generally uninterested (perhaps opposed to) tasks like handling vacation requests or writing performance reports.
Why you'd take a person like this out of the deep engineering role and put them into a formal "management" role that can be filled by a much larger pool of workers is beyond me.
This model was then repurposed to direct commerical enterprise and while those enterprises consisted of a composite of simple tasks (eg manufacturing) things worked pretty well. The knowledgeable people in charge of the less knowledgeable.
However when the tasks become much more complex such as science based enterprises (eg pharmaceuticals and engineering) the model fails.
You still need someone to "be in charge", that is, to organize things at a higher level but now the knowledge required to do that is much lower than the knowledge required to do the actual work. And yet the sense still persists that the organizer role is a "higher" position in the organization.
Consequently you have situations where a young MBA (for example) is organizing a team of PhD's where he/she thinks they are the "the boss" rather than "the organizer" of the team. And this naturally, can lead to dissension. Health care for example suffers from a lot of this.
For these organizations its time to drop the military model and come up with a more practical abstraction with a better mapping to reality.
Nothing against managers. Just have impression engineers are heavily undervalued.
To achieve anything hard you'll need a team of engineers. That single good manager is going to be the one that attracts and retains those good engineers. You need few good managers but they're much harder to find.
These engineers can be a huge factor in the success of a project. I'm not saying good general managers aren't valuable, or that they're easy to find, but they're a bit more of a commodity. They aren't those extremely rare birds like highly talented engineers who can coordinate the efforts of a team and bring a highly complicated project through.
Unfortunately, I think we sort of miss this in our field. Top lawyers and physicians continue to call themselves lawyers and physicians, even as they rise into "management." They may hire "managers" at their firms, but true leadership in a complicated legal case, for instance, requires a very senior person who is so deeply immersed in the law that it makes more sense to call him or her a lawyer than a "manager".
In short, nobody thinks that a person decided not to "go into management" because his or her title is still Lawyer, or Surgeon. We seem to place a stronger dividing line in engineering.
You know, that may be (yet another) reason young people with options don't go into software development or engineering. Maybe they don't like the end game, and prefer other fields for that reason.
But otherwise, it is like saying a car is more valuable when it lacks a steering wheel and seat belts.