It is not to say that what managers do is not important. But, I am not yet convinced that as a manager you should get paid more because you have direct reports and have people management responsibilities.
- a management track
- an IC (individual contributor) track
There are different levels on the different tracks, and each is paid for that level. A super experienced IC will be paid more than a junior manager, and vice versa. So it doesn't have to be true that a manager earns more than an IC, and for example many ICs at Google are paid millions of $$, much much more than the average manager (or average IC, of course).
But when managers are paid more, why is that? Sometimes, the experience needed to be a manager is higher. For example, an engineering manager that wasn't previously an engineer may struggle to manage their team. As such, an engineering manager might have 10 years of engineering behind them before making the leap over to other track, and we don't just start them at the bottom given their relevant experience.
Another reason is that managers are multipliers. A good manager can take a team of good ICs and turn them into amazing ICs working together as a team. A bad manager might multiply the team by 0.5, or 0.1, but no-one hires a manager expecting them to suck, so you pay them as if their multiplier is 2x (and hopefully fire them if they suck).
Of course, managers and ICs are different roles in the employment market. ICs often don't like management (which is a challenging, and often very different job from ICing). So they different have supply/demand curves.
If the above doesn't apply to your workplace, then the obvious thing is true: they pay managers more because they value managers more. Whether that is the right thing to do is clearly in the eye of the beholder.
like happening to be the manager of that guy who wrote swift.
Question for clarification: Do those ICs making "a lot" report to managers that make more, less or equal (generally speaking of course)?
(This assumes that the "managers" are strictly people managers. Often, managers might do some or all of managing teams, products, releases, people, or technical leadership. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of to have a manager's team include an engineer far senior to the manager.)
So it’s not unheard of. It is fairly uncommon however, the average manager is probably making somewhat more than the average engineer they manage at the large tech companies.
I think this is a pretty common structure for companies that actually have an IC track that goes being senior engineer.
There is no any such reason.
Current day managerial jobs descend directly from days of feudalism and aristocracy. Where the master had to be richer than the slaves to enforce his rule over the serfs.
All the best having a underpaid manager exercising control over overpaid ICs, it doesn't start, let alone work well. In short this is social sanction.
The reality is any set up which require a pyramid to exist, there will be pay grades, people down the pyramids will be paid no matter what miracles they will pull off. And people at the top will maintain political control to further their interests.
That is all there is to it. If we evaluated these 'managers' on merit. Then even being called a supervisor would be a lot for these glorified email routers and table fillers.
Also, your cynical view completely breaks down for knowledge work; you can't simply stand over a room of programmers cracking a whip and expect anything to improve. Maybe you've experienced that, but that's not what skilled managers in productive tech companies are paid to do.
It was the same in the court of Julius Caesar its the same in Google.
Having said that, Google is not your typical company. I know managers in Google who push thousands of lines of code per week and are often more productive and more hand-on than the engineers that report to them. In such cases, it is only fair that they earn more than the engineers.
I agree with dasil003 that your cynical view breaks down in productive technology companies. Maybe that's what you have experiened but the places I have worked at had no resemblance with the court of Julius Caesar and the managers were definitely not mere email routers.
* Managers' actions take effect across the entire team, and therefore having a 1x manager vs a 1.1x manager on a 10 person team is like if any individual (assuming evenness in the team) goes from 1x to 2x.
* It is harder to find someone who can effectively manage human beings than someone who can effectively solve technical problems. Mildly supportive evidence is the percentage of people who complain about their managers vs. the percentage of people who complain about how hard the problems they have to solve are. Your maximum attainable compensation is the minimum of the value you provide and the cost to replace you, and good managers are rare.
* In practice, few people are pure managers - they also solve technical problems. Often, they will participate in architecture questions, but not implementation. If they do so, their technical contributions are also on a lever.
However, there are secondary factors too:
* Managers tend to have more experience. More experience, until a point, leads to higher compensation because successful experienced people are rarer
* The depth to which humans perceive contribution to success is limited. A CEO will see whether his engineering division is effectively delivering value and reward or punish its organizational leader. Likewise all the way down the chain. This is leverage in terms of responsibility and risk.
But the short form of my theory is that where it's true, it's often because they deliver comparatively higher value to the organization.
If it's true, a consequence would be that the organizations that have a culture of self-organization and alignment will have managers that command smaller multipliers solely on their management skills while those whose members require substantial management (for mediation, communication, or prioritization) will place a premium on managers.
I don't honestly think this is very rare. Certainly word on the street is that Netflix comp is fairly close on Senior ICs and Senior Engineering Managers, if not slightly tilted towards the former, but I don't know for sure.
Next let's explore the ideal case. An engineer is very good at using tools to accomplish work. A good manager should be very good at using/making/helping humans accomplish work. Totally different skill set, but not easy, and potentially very profitable for the company. I think that there is a belief that if you assume responsibility for a team that you are now the primary locus of work getting done or not and thus your risk/reward levels are increased.
The reality is more along the lines of, "persuasive people end up in control of capital and then pay people like themselves more." Really effective leaders, through myriad strategies both good and bad, manage to take the potential work output of a group of individuals and focus it on their goals preferentially. This is super powerful. They see this as their particular talent and power and, noting how powerful it is, want to compensate others who are doing something similar. This is an admittedly jaded and machiavellian take on management.
If managers were paid less than (or just as much as) their directs, what would change?
If I can go a whole quarter without seeing some unspeakable mess in the bathroom of a fortune 50 company, that would be amazing. 7+ years in, so far no luck.
I'm of the opinion that any job is super hard if you apply yourself.
But when they do, it's because of leveraged impact. If I'm a 10x engineer, then that's a huge individual contribution. However, if I'm a 2x manager with 12 reports, then my impact is greater than a 10x engineer. That is to say, if I can make my 12 reports twice as productive, then that's a huge benefit to the org. If I'm a 2x director with 4 managers reporting to me, then that 2x compounds through each level of the org.
Now, a 2x manager might seem far fetched, but so is a 10x engineer if we're being honest. Think about your productivity under your best boss vs your worst boss.
What is a bit of nonsense is bad managers. But that's a whole different issue, with tomes of academic research (see The Peter Principle) trying to figure out why incompetence is so pervasive in management.
Think of software for a moment. Has there every been a library, language, framework, etc that you absolutely love to use? The API is just right, the framework is the perfect level of opinionated vs. not opinionated, it just gets out of your way and lets you accomplish what you want, it's consistently reliable, it has fantastic backwards compatibility, it's error handling semantics are clear and the right level of verboseness, the internals are so well architected that it's also incredibly performant, etc.
It's just such a pleasure to work with. It's always just what you need, right when you need it, exactly how you needed it.
A company is a system, just like software. And a team is a submodule within that system. A 2x manager is the person that is able to make (and maintains) their team into the type of beloved system I mentioned above. How they do that is dependent on their expertise at comprehending, navigating, and influencing the larger system, and shaping their team to be precisely what that larger environment needs.
As hard as it is to do the above, it's really, really easy for a 0.1x manager to destroy that type of system/team. A few breaking API changes ("my team no longer handles those types of request you've been giving my team for years" vs "I've spoken with team x and it turns out they're more appropriately staffed to complete that work. Don't worry though, I've got a change management process in place and will ensure the handoff is seamless for you", refactoring some internal code that kills performance (i.e. losing important ICs without any risk mitigation/change management in place), etc can all tank the goodwill and community adoption of that once beloved system.
I switch between being an IC, a purely people manager, a functional manager (i.e. a team lead with people management and hiring/firing authority), and a "manager" (that's effectively an IC with a manager title so I have the organizational authority to execute the type of work I was doing). If you've never been a manager before, let me tell you: doing that shit right is exhausting. The biggest difference between being an IC and being a manager is that, as an IC, I'm able to ignore 90% of the bullshit around me and focus on my work. As a manager (whether doing IC work or purely people-managing), I can't ever tune out that organizational noise/bullshit/dysfunction/needs, because the more in tune I am with that the more likely that I can position my team to support the company, and in doing so ensure the peace of my team.
It's hard to image what a 2x manager is, because there's no single way to define one. But as an IC, having (or losing) a 2x manager will have a noticeable impact on you and your team's productivity over time, in any of a dozen or so different ways.
I think of managing as keeping a bunch of freight trains from smashing into one another. The manager can't claim to be making things move twice as fast, and it's hard to recognize the absence of disaster as a contribution. But if the managing were going poorly, everyone would be far worse off.
The devil is in the details. Does the 10x engineer accomplish that by pairing, code reviews, architectural leadership, refactoring, mentorship, improving team tooling and build processes, or just doing all the work themselves? The answe is any and potentially all of the above, as whatever the situation dictates. The 10x engineer is seen as 10x because they have a good sense of situational awareness and capacity to adapt both strategically and tactically as needed, which compounds itself to become an incredible source of productivity.
The same is true for a 2x manager shielding the team from corporate bullshit and clearing obstacles. Those are end goals, but there are countless paths to take to get to those goals, not all of which will lead you there. A 2x manager is able to suss out the fine line required to balance team needs against organizational forces in such a way that they'll have the policital capital[1] required to be a good steward/advocate of their team while also having their team seen as a productive asset of the company in order to accrue that political capital. Something which is ridiculously more difficult than it needs to be, if you're attempting to do so in a way that's sustainable continuously and not just a short term play that'll rebound later on.
>why incompetence is so pervasive in management.
Technical incompetence seems to help in being a successful order maintainer. That way you don't get easily swayed by technical reasons away from the "right way" that the higher-ups lead you on. Natural selection in management doesn't behave kindly toward managers questioning technical merits of the decisions flushed down ... err ... communicated from the higher levels.
Aside from the multiplier effect of a good manager which is mentioned in a few other comments, a manager is someone to whom the employer can delegate responsibility. This is usually the most valued skill set an employee can possess -- if as the owner/CEO/VP/General Manager you can just take a certain area of the business, give it to that person, and sleep easy at night knowing that it's taken care of, that peace of mind is worth any price because you're now able to focus your energy on other areas of the business.
The same cannot generally be said about any IC (even though in come cases great ICs can have a remarkable impact on the business).
As you go deeper down a corporate hierarchy motivations may become distorted, but fundamentally this is how it works at the top.
When it is true that managers make more, there's no single reason. On the good side, the effect of a good manager compared to a bad one can be bigger than for an IC. On the bad side, managers get to whisper more in the ears of those who control the money. In between, and most often, let me ask you one simple question.
* Would you want to be a manager?
For me the answer is HELL NO. I got close to it once, and didn't care for it. Many other ICs feel the same way. You'd have to pay us extra to give up what we do now for management work ... and so that's exactly what often happens. Supply and demand, pure and simple.
Part of it is that good managers act as an umbrella for their reports and keep unnecessarily distracting or stressful issues from taking up their time. But that means the manager is dealing with that stress instead.
Part of it is that managers often have a broader scope of responsibility. Senior managers and higher often have multiple projects under their belt and are held responsible for their continued success.
Part of it is that the success state of a manager's work depends on the success of other employees, which makes it more difficult for them to control whether they do well by their own effort. A really good manager could be paired up with a really bad employee who eventually has to be fired; did that manager do a bad job since their report got fired, or did they do a good job identifying that they needed to be fired? It's situational, and that ambiguity increases the risk of being fairly rewarded. Higher risk demands higher compensation.
Part of it is that demand for good managers is high enough that the market prices their salaries higher. Anecdotally, I can say that a bad manager hire has a much worse impact than a bad IC hire, so the stakes are higher, which raises prices.
Are those ICs getting paid more than their immediate manager?
My experience is that I was much more effective as a team lead than an individual contributor. I was able to do and guide research, do proof of concepts that other people productized and had far more accomplishments guiding a team of junior to mid level developers.
Now, trying to implement the same kind of changes as an individual contributor is taking far longer. I have more say so over the architectural direction of my team now just based on my expertise and relationships and no red tape (here I’m an AWS admin, at my prior company I had to go through multiple approvals to get anything done), but since I actually have to do the work instead of directing a team, my accomplishments are a lot slower.
I can see first hand the effectiveness of my manager and his ability to be a force multiplier over my ability to get things done as an individual contributor.
I’m not complaining, when I had a choice when I was looking for a job I could have been hired as an architect/Dev lead making slightly more than I make now using technology I was intimately familiar with but I wouldn’t be able to grow my technical skills and I like development.
But the truth is, I could accomplish a lot more with a team of people reporting to me but I purposefully stay in my lane even though my manager and his manager are both pushing me to take a leadership position. I took this job to learn and improve technically, not to manage.
With that being said, why do managers get paid more? Think of it as parents versus kids. Who has the most responsibilities? Parents... who has collected the most data? Parents... who gets blammed when things go wrong? Parents... who pay the price when things go wrong? Parents.
That is why manager have a higher salary braket in general. Plus, they usually come from an IC path with a big hands-on experience. They’ve already nailed the IC salary range.
As others have noted in this thread, it's not always true that managers are paid more, but you're right to note that it's normal. There are some dynamics at play to make it happen. Two that spring to mind are (a) managers are often promoted from the ranks of successful IC's. They've probably been around for a few annual raises / promotions as an IC, plus they get a raise for the management promotion. It adds up. (b) A bad manager has more destructive potential than a bad IC. They can make more expensive mistakes, and devote teams of IC's to making those mistakes with them. Their negative attitudes or incompetence can tank morale across lots of people, rather than just their immediate teammates. Their inefficiency can lower the productivity of lots of IC's, rather than just themselves. All the same applies in the positive direction, but the negative is key, because loss-avoidance psychology is a strong force. So if I'm deciding peoples' compensation and I have a good manager, I'm going to pay them enough to keep them. If I don't, and I need to replace them, then I run the risk of making a bad hire, which would make a lot of people miserable and may lead to more attrition, especially among their direct reports, whose work is also valuable to me. If you've been lucky enough to have bad coworkers fired quickly, you know that their (ex) teammates breathe a sigh of relief and thank management for dealing with it. On the flipside, if an IC gets a new manager every few months, (especially a new _bad_ manager) they quickly decide this is a chaotic workplace and take their skills elsewhere.
# Ideally you don't want managers to write code since that would set them on a path where they can get preoccupied with stuff which is not the big picture.
# Managers tend to see the big picture and direct the team on its course with good people management skills. This is one of the most significant role in the organization.
# Measuring the importance of an individual to an organization based on his/her pay package is not the right median.
# Most software engineers are pampered a lot unlike other profession so they tend to have an inflated ego to assume they are worth more than almost everyone. Just having an ability to hard labor a building construction never meant the person is the most significant!. Not an ideal comparison but hope it drives home the point.
In most cases people envisioning bigger picture can get paid more but that is in no way an unfair thing.
This, at least has been the case for each of the SMBs that I've worked in which managers are purely non-technical and hired for their ability to manage people and projects (can't afford to not have Engineers doing engineering).
At one place, my direct sup was expected to wear both the manager and Engineer hat (being technical). The next two layers up were middle managers who only managed. Neither layer made more than anyone in engineering.
At Microsoft, senior ICs (IC4 and above) make more than managers (typically M3s) in engineering teams but often the tables are reversed in services and sales teams, because managers in customer-facing teams have business targets with direct bearing on their unit/sub revenue.
I’ve been in both kinds of teams, and there is zero correlation between actual management skills and where HR rates them at, so YMMV.
This is, in my experience, generally not the case.
Setting aside all the implicit indirect contributions (support, development, coaching, personality management, etcetera), managers generally shape work by deciding what work is going to be done, how to mobilize resources, communicating the results outside the team's domain, and being accountable for it. Those are direct, tangible contributions.
Can anyone clarify?
As I understand teams are built from managerial roles and "worker" or technical or engineering roles. If it has to be a three tier system instead of two, it (typically) consists of a manager, then one or more tech/team lead(s), then engineer(s). I'm not sure which one of these are individual contributors. (or aren't they all?)
Managers are people who enjoy being around groups of people more than they enjoy being around “things”.
ICs tend to reserve more time thinking and working alone and enjoy talks with individuals more than navigating group-dynamics.
Enjoyment in groups leads to experience in group dynamics. Experience in group dynamics and having many relationships gets you more chances to climb up the salary ladder.
This seems economically rational. You want your sales people focused on selling.
Managers and leaders get paid more for that singular reason. Shepherding a team to achieve a desired result is harder than it seems.
Of course there are bad managers...
Now tell them that they will not be able to code anymore and, intead, that they will have to deal with other developers' problems.
You need to offer a good raise for that.
It's also much more difficult to get better at managing people than getting better at engineering. Although I suppose if you're a really good manager that may not be true.
1) they know how much everybody gets paid 2) they can keep secrets
Top-notch technicians (programmers) often get paid more than their managers.
True story.
A lot of people will hire people from their college networks or whatever it may be. If they're hiring managers blindly based on some alleged track record, then they're just downright incompetent or taking a risk that has low odds of working well for the team :)