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Comment by JamesHinnek | Hacker News Reader

meanwhile, we hire managers that don't have basic decision-making or people skills... They justify their higher salaries due to their higher responsibilities, which they just assume the risks and jump jobs when shit goes south.

A reminder that your pay corresponds with your expected skills, hiring a top 1% de offering market average, is a delusion. But the interview process is out of control for devs, and basically non-existent for managers.

Ps: I'm a manager, so I can say that I'm overpaid for what I deliver, while devs are underpaid and the expectation on them is out of reality.

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Same for PMs — huge variance in ability and impact but the interview process is not diagnostic most of the time and same for performance management

From your POV what do you think we should do?

Agree there are a lot of bad managers out there, a decade of tech bull market and hyper growth didn’t help. Not sure why you think expectations and interview standards are lower for managers in general though. For me, managers have a much higher bar than ICs because they must have a high level of technical experience and judgement in addition to all the people skills and strategy. An EM must fill the gaps between other functions because at the end of the day engineering (for software shops) is who ships the product. If you think it’s easier than being an IC I don’t think you’re doing it right.

> Ps: I'm a manager, so I can say that I'm overpaid for what I deliver, while devs are underpaid and the expectation on them is out of reality.

If you are able to recognise this, surely you have the power and the incentive to change this?

Line managers basically never have the final word on pay, at most they sometimes get discretion to move pay around within a defined band. Pay bands are handled by the C-suite in small companies and compensation departments in large companies. Both generally reference databases of "market rate" compensation.

As a rule, people are not paid "what they are worth", they are either paid market rates or convince the company they have a differentiated skillset that warrants compensation beyond what is normal in the market (usually by tying their performance to some important metric). No one has yet found a way to change this from within a corporate structure.

> If you are able to recognise this, surely you have the power and the incentive to change this?

Except in the tiniest of startups, managers and even directors have just about zero say in compensation ranges.

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