Why are managers paid more than us, when we clearly do the harder work?

This sort of argument is heard the world over.

- When I worked construction: "Why is the foreman paid more when all he does is lean on a shovel?"

- When I worked as a line cook: "Why does the back-of-the-house manager get paid more when I'm over this grill sweating my ass off and he's over there just pushing salads."

- When I worked grocery: "Why am I paid less than the manager who just rides a floor jack all day?"

Most recent is similar to what's being discussed in the article.

It seems about everyone ponders a similar question at some point in their (early) career.

> Why are managers paid more than us, when we clearly do the harder work?

If you're asking the question, you're not treating your manager badly enough.

Building a strawnman and then attacking it makes for poor content.

Why does the pimp make more than the prostitutes?

Even worse is when a manager has to work harder than you.

Managers are paid more because they are higher in the hierarchy of an organization than engineers, and therefore they know how much engineers on their team are paid. If you paid them less than the engineers they would be emotionally unable to do their job. The cost of paying them more is lower than the trouble that would be caused if you paid them according to how much you would need to pay someone to do that job given the supply of talent available.

Most managers in software organizations aren't very good software engineers, and they aren't better managers than managers you find in other related fields. The idea that a mediocre to poor software engineer who is in a management role should be paid 3x what an equivalent level manager who manages mechanical engineers is paid is an absurdity, since the reason software engineers are paid so much is that there is far more demand compared to the supply. They aren't better at managing projects or teams than a random manager from another engineering discipline, yet they command much higher salaries (but don't really contribute significant domain specific knowledge which might justify such a situation). This is sufficient demonstration of my point, I think.

If engineers had access to the pay information of other engineers the average pay of engineers at most companies would go up 50% to 100% (the lower paid engineers would see a 50% to 100% increase in pay, the actual average across all engineers would go up something like 20% to 50%), since that is approximately the differential from the lowest to highest paid engineer at the same level with the same experience and skill within the same organization. I'm bringing up the pay differential of engineers to demonstrate how valuable the knowledge of other's pay is when negotiating your own.