But how do you evaluate value on a multi person and even multi team project? Is the tester or security person valued as much as the senior dev? Without them the devs work might do more harm than good, right? How do we put value on those intangibles?
> They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead.
I used to think this way. Then I became a manager. (Now I'm an individual contributor/IC again.) Oh, how wrong I was.
Managers do coordination, which is far different than building, but typically more valuable. Why is it more valuable? Leverage.
If I as an IC do the wrong thing and it doesn't get to production, it typically wastes my time (and any time needed to fix the mess, if doing so is harder than `git reset`).
If a team of people do the wrong thing, then that's an entire team's time wasted. Managers exist to ensure that a team is pointed in the right direction. Figuring this out could include meetings (oh so many meetings) with other parts of the business or customers, discussing priorities and timelines and ensuring dependencies are understood and met.
You also need to foster intrateam communication so that Bob learns that Alice has already partway solved problem X, or Alice learns that Tracy has experience in technology Y. Sure, you could rely on ICs to do this, and good ones will, but I've seen communication short circuit big issues and save lots of development time.
Is the manager's effort overhead if, by their efforts (even partially, with the help of other team members), the team solves the correct problem, rather than the wrong problem correctly?
This explanation ignores the political aspect of management (protecting your team from budget cuts, layoffs and being pulled into extraneous meetings/other efforts). I've intentionally ignored this because it was minimal at most places I've been a manager, so I can't speak out of personal experience. But I've heard about other places where this was a large chunk of the value added by management.
If the IC does the wrong thing, that could screw up the coordination between all these other parts.
I don't envy the politics, but the coordination and meetings are easy. I'd rather be doing that, but you can't get there without moving up the ladder. I was a tech lead for a year and it was probably half coordination and meetings and the other half was troubleshooting and development. It was great... except they didn't promote me to that level.
Evaluating value is usually not straightforward, unless the person was working alone it is always a subjective thing. If a junior is given a project alone, then they may provide zero value to the company if they can't complete it, but if they were paired with a senior, then together they should provide more value than the senior alone. Similarly, a manager's value is more indirect by providing a direction for the team but it adds up since they may be enabling the work of 5-10 people.
For support roles, their value comes from the costs that they help prevent. A security expert is like insurance, where they provide value by ensuring the company's product has the minimum chance of being exploited as that could damage the business in multiple ways.
Yeah, but that's kind of my point - it's not easily calculated, so how can we say a senior easily provides an extra $40k. If we are saying the manager can make a lot because they're basically directing 10 people. If you have a security expert on a team of 10 people, should they be worth similar? After all, the tool is likely worthless if it's insecure, making all those efforts by others fruitless.
I guess I'm just skeptical and jaded based on my past experiences.
Just because it isn't easily calculated on an individual basis doesn't mean that it is impossible to figure out. If you know how much revenue your group provides to the company and then look at who contributes what relatively as a good enough estimate.
Since you bring up a security team, it absolutely can be estimated there as well, what other companies have had hacks and what did it cost them? How does that compare to the risk on your product and the damage to the business if you were compromised?
Not to mention a $40k salary difference means you should be providing multiple times that difference in value to the company. Just providing $40k of additional value is a rounding error for most reasonably sized companies, I've worked on projects where two people provided >$1M of ongoing cost savings per year.
You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way. The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything.
"You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way."
Then how does it work? It seems that senior devs should make the same as junior devs if the numbers aren't tied to value.
"The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything."
On an individual level that might be true, but that doesn't address it at the aggregate level.
