When a project is managed by one manager and coded by five developers, you could easily lose replace two of those developers with little impact. If you lost the manager (who is calculating deadlines, coordinating with other departments, pitching for funding, as well as managing the individual developers) the project could run into problems quickly.
On the face of it, it seems unfair - the developers are the ones actually writing the code after all. But the HN trope that managers are useless and feckless isn't correct.
Really? In my experience managers can be replaced rather easily, or at least more easily than it is to a replace a single engineer. It always takes some time for the new software engineer to learn the specifics of the project, and even more time to really grasp the business domain. The new manager has stuff to learn too, of course, but in my opinion it's less than what a new engineer needs to learn.
In addition, if you replace two software engineers, you pretty much lose two man-months of work, but replacing a manager shouldn't cause much problems in the first month.
Possibly true. But think about how most engineering managers attained that role...it was because companies thought they were good engineers, despite little if any evidence that they'd ever make good managers. Throw in a dash of, "we don't really have a training budget" for this new profession (which it is...management is an entirely different profession from engineering), and you have a recipe for disappointing, easily replaceable parts.
The problem being that replacement "good" managers and engineers aren't just sitting around waiting for you to hire them - they're already in good jobs - see also: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
Additionally, for managers, you can't promote from your summer interns.
Developers on the other hand are the worker-bees/ants. Individually replaceable but as a collective, the backbone of an colony/swarm! A queen bee cannot survive without its attendants.
Marx got it all wrong, the owners who provides the means of productions and the proletariat who provides the labor are partners in hand.
Why are some people so individualistic to nitpick on why they make $80K yr and drive a Prius vs. someone else who makes $250K and drives a E-class, when we are all together in this together for the same goal for the greater good of the same collective, for the investors and maximizing the shareholder value???
There are exceptions of course, but the unequal pay has nothing to do with skill as far as I'm concerned.
Which is where I fundamentally disagree with you. Optimised database indexes (for example) can be valuable to a company. But if the company lacked a developer who could optimise them, they could get by - they'd just have to get more/faster servers.
You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same way. In fact, doing so usually makes it worse. If you don't have managers that know the company, can interact with other stakeholders and otherwise just manage people, you're screwed.
If you think that kind of stuff is secretarial work then I could just as easily counter by saying that development is basically just glorified word processing. And should be compensated as such.
Every communication layer you add to this mix has an enourmous cost. It is a bit like playing Chinese Whispers.
I think the first level of important management is managing teams of teams or portfolios of projects
Look up complexity theory. There are plenty of cases where hardware will not make up for a poorly written sql query. If the people giving direction don't understand the technology, they will make stupid decisions like thinking that they can fix a bad query by throwing hardware at it.
>You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same way. In fact, doing so usually makes it worse. If you don't have managers that know the company, can interact with other stakeholders and otherwise just manage people, you're screwed.
This statement has done nothing to convince me that managers have skill that is so hard to find as to justify their high wages.
You certainly need managers, but I think it best if you pick a suitable engineer for this role precisely to avoid the database example you just provided. An engineering manager should get a higher pay than their peers, because they are not only experts in the domain but also have some people skills.
But a non-expert manager? Their only skill is communicating and giving orders? This is role that should ideally go away.