Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.

Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value.

When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount.

All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people.

It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.

View on HN

I agree, but quantifying value add is very hard. If we were just comparing small companies against each other then it would be straightforward to just look at each companies profit. But when you look at a team within a company, how can we say what that teams value add is?

Say we considered a simplified case and focused on a single engineering team that is solely responsible for a single product. Just looking at the revenue generated by that product is insufficient since it excludes the contributions of sales, marketing, business development, etc. in driving that revenue. And practice most engineering teams are dependent on other engineering teams for providing shared services and infrastructure.

Its also insufficient to just consider current revenue of a product. We also need to consider the potential future gains from a product, which is unknown.

And quantifying value add gets even harder when we start looking at individual people. Considering individual contributor engineers, there are numerous ways that one can contribute, ranging from developing new features, diagnosing and fixing bugs, writing and updating documentation, mentoring, interviewing candidates, etc.

> Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.

And there's a second-order casualty of that: the people who are assigned to report to such an engineer-become-manager.

This happened to me on my previous job. The most brilliant programmer I've ever worked with got promoted to a manager, for the dumb reason that the company's programmer salary bands didn't go high enough for what he was (way more than) worth. As a manager he had to have headcount reporting to him, and I got assigned to be one of that headcount. He had no interest in people-managing. I didn't begrudge him for that at all - but it was clear my own career would go nowhere reporting to someone with no interest in managing, so I left that job shortly after.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com