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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

A cynical take on your observations sometimes occurs to me, and seems pertinent.

The managers set the wages. Therefore, they will be well-paid, and their contributions will readily recognized.

This is simplistic and does not explain everything, but I think it is a major ingredient.

A less cynical explanation for the same data: a great manager helps many people to be more productive. A great manager of managers help many more people to be more productive. Management scales much more than individual contribution.

The market mostly sets the wages. Pay too low, and you'll be unable to hire anyone. There's also an upper bounds on what one person is worth. It can be a lot, and the difference in productivity between average and superstar programmers is well noted. But even a highly productive programmer has a limited value as an individual member of a team.

Executives get promoted because they've proven to be able to get groups of people to work together to achieve something. Most programmers don't want to or can't do that. Our trade is mostly one of individual contributions, often as part of a team but generally we're not responsible for more than our own tasks, and we're generally not blamed when one of our peers can't keep up.

> The market mostly sets the wages

Unless, you know, several high-ranked managers collude together. Like it happened with Google and Apple.

There's also a flip side of this: a manager of a team of N is responsible for representing the collective results of a team of N.

If the team is successful and hits a home run, then the manager benefits a lot.

If the team crashes and burns, then the manager is at significant risk of job loss.

(Yes, office politics will come into play and managers will do their best in the latter case to diffuse blame, but the point is, they are the most visible elements of their respective teams.)

> If the team crashes and burns, then the manager is at significant risk of job loss.

I hear this frequently, but I'm not sure it matches my experience well. Among people I've known and worked with, I haven't noticed that managers get fired at any greater rate than non-managers.

I haven't looked at any actual statistics on this; maybe management really is much riskier. But I can't help suspecting that the idea that management (and especially executive) pay is justified by greater career risk may be mostly a story told by managers to make themselves and others feel better about pay differentials.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say: "If the team crashes and burns, then the naive, politically confused, disconnected manager is at significant risk of job loss".

Most people don't like firing people they have worked with for months or years. Most people don't like getting fired. The savvy manager who knows organizational jiu-jitsu and can explain with a great story can often come up smelling like roses after disaster. The naive manager who assumes that everything is the way the mission statement says it is ... will be out on his ass.

See: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

> The managers set the wages. Therefore, they will be well-paid, and their contributions will readily recognized.

It really depends on the managers. We live in a culture that rewards paying oneself well, even to the detriment of others' pay. Root cause analysis.

Like being good with makeup can help you be more attractive, learning how to persuade managers that you are valuable is a skill of its own. You don't have to be a manager to have this skill, although it is a subset of the management skillset.

Leverage and measurability.

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