IMO the easiest way to solve this issue would be to normalize ICs making more than their managers. That way, only the people who really want to be managers are managing.
Not going to happen, fundamentally just due to supply and demand.
I have been a senior/principal engineer, as well as a director/senior director. The fact is that being a manager or director is just fundamentally a much harder job than being an IC. It's not that it's inherently more difficult, it's just that the day-to-day is much more of a grind than being an IC. For people wondering why engineering interviews can be so obscure/difficult, it's often because the cost of a bad hire can be catastrophic to a manager. I had a great team of about 30 people, except for 1 person who just couldn't get along with others. I spent about 80% of my energy on that person, and it sucked.
So for people wondering why managers get paid more, it's just that it's a shittier job that fewer people want to do than program.
I find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy that you find in most corporate systems than because of anything inherent to the day-to-day job. CEO doesn’t think people lower on the totem pole should be paid more than them, so they hire people at lower income levels. Same for the VPs and the Directors and the layers of middle management until you get down to the ICs.
I mean, just look at comments around this topic whenever it comes up. People want ICs to get paid more because they don't want to work as managers. Heck, I most definitely agree with them - again, I was a manager, and I won't do it again either. That means I have accepted that I'll make less money, but I'm fine with that. Someone else can have that shitty job.
I don't want to clean toilets or man a register either, but people who do those things don't get paid more than me. There's something else going on with how managers get paid.
You don't, and not many people do, but the fact is that there are lots, and lots, and lots of people without the skill sets necessary to move to higher paying jobs, so it's still based on supply and demand. Of course, good managers should generate a lot more value than a janitor or a cashier, so there should be more available to pay them. Even if hardly anyone wanted those janitor or cashier jobs, there would still be a limit on what they could be paid based on value created (and indeed, the "labor shortage" you hear about all the time now in those lower paying jobs is due to the fact that not that many people want them but in many cases company owners can't afford to pay them more).
> Of course, good managers should generate a lot more value than a janitor or a cashier
If I can be excused to ramble a bit...
I think the job is optimization? If so the hypothetical perfect manager would get it right really fast and have nothing to do but wait for the next dumpster fire that might never happen or some micro optimization that isn't worth much.
Measuring performance (at least in real time) seems hard if not impossible?
With a cashier it is easy, if they handle 100 products per minute, 6000 per hour, they get 12 per hour or 0.2 cents per product handled, on the average product it is a perceptional difference of zero. I, as the customer buying 100 products, don't care if I pay 20 cents or 2 euro.
I've had a hundred such jobs, did the math on many, it was spectacularly hilarious. Best one was 5 factory workers making half a million boxes of cookies in a 5 hour shift for 35 euro/day. They could easily pay 1000 euro/day, the customer wouldn't even notice it.
In stead it is really hard for them now, they cant find employees. They are far behind on schedule. Existing employees are made to work even harder.
Being unable to afford to pay more is actually not how it works. You add up what it costs to deliver a service or a product and then you conclude if its a viable business model.
It is not that the rent is to dmn high, parts or ingredients are to expensive, employees are unwilling to work for peanuts etc. There is no limit on how much a janitor costs. The market sets it, employees and employers are just dragged along - kicking and screaming if need be.
If we continue the story and say the employees want to much money we might end up back at their rent being to dmn high.
But surely no one would continue that story to the point where you cant find employees because the cookies got 1 cent more expensive?
I get 2 letters every year, one says my rent goes up by 5%, the other says my salary goes up by 1%. Both talk similarly about inflation. It's quite comical.
I’d say there are many people without the skills to be a top tier engineer. In fact I picked my IC to manager conversions based on their inability to progress as an IC but their empathetic and organizational abilities let them be a credible engineering manager. They weren’t great engineers but they were good enough to know what good work looks like. However the absolute best IC engineers that commanded the most money could easily have been a successful manager but enjoyed IC work more, and were much more valuable making engineering decisions than holding 1:1s and meeting with auditors. They were effectively matrix managers in many respects. That’s a much more rare skill, and you can’t mentor someone into being a top engineer. They’re born, and are born at the same rate as they always have been, and are there for much more rare as the industry and demand has grown.
It's a shitty job for conscientious people. I've seen the toll it has taken on some of them.
People who are lower down on the empathy scale don't have that problem and the fact that this generally makes them worse at the job doesn't reduce their pay.
I also find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy.
In any organization somewhere between 1% and 10% of people will suck up 80% of leadership's time if you let them.
Worse, they make the organization toxic for everybody else.
I've come to believe the most important job of a manager is to quickly identify these people and either fire them or neutralize them (i.e. put them in a closet and assign them a meaningless task).
This requires a culture shift in most organizations to understand that toxic people (e.g. bullies, narcissists, and those with other serious personality disorders) have an outsize negative impact on productivity and profits and can kill the company if you don't get rid of them quickly.
I've witnessed this across a few people and across a few companies—both in terms of wasting time for the company, or pushing the company to be better.
There's definitely folks that take all they can get, scream about unnecessary things, and are just general drama, but overall are basically an underperforming IC. (I've even seen one become "best friends" with a director which caused all sorts of chaos and disorganization in the org below them, with the director blissfully unaware because the toxic person was giving side-channel status update to the director outside of the org hierarchy.)
Neutralizing them by giving them unimportant tasks often enables them to be louder elsewhere.
There's also people who are loud because they're trying to make the company better. They'll make you uncomfortable as a manager, and they'll make you have uncomfortable conversations with your leadership. They're...probably the ones to listen to.
True leadership is knowing who to keep close—even if uncomfortable—and who to rapidly manage out.
There is an additional dimension here - some people start off great and then become toxic due to external conditions (home problems, health issues, organizational strife). Sometimes those problems are resolvable (or mitigable). Sometimes your "problem child" becomes a stalwart after their situation is resolved.
A good manager can root cause these issues and then determine if the resolution is workable in a reasonable timeframe. A great manager keeps this in mind while coordinating all activities and requires their direct reports to assist them in doing this.
Finally, great leaders are sometimes not great managers. Another note - even managers can shift from good/great/bad over time.
I'm no manager but if you have a much larger salary and 80% of that money is spend on dealing with a single employee. Even I can figure out what should happen next. I cant imagine a justification for your 20% performance.
I fundamentally disagree, as a similarly senior person at various globo mega FAANG corps, my observation of the dynamics is managers are paid more at some companies because managers set compensation and there is a social barrier to paying subordinates more than their managers. At other globo mega FAANG corps you get paid what is required to retain you. Most engineers make less than there managers simply because the managers are more senior in their career and have a lot of options at competitors. But exceptional engineers are wildly rare and in demand breaking the highest pay bands. This also holds for other fields where there’s the two sigma IC who is a rain maker - sales, trading, etc. I’ve never seen a company that’s unable to fill even its most senior ranks readily, but I’ve seen many that can’t retain star traders or sales people or engineers and it’s usually an unwillingness to break the social taboo of “overpaying” an IC. Those companies don’t understand how markets work and generally their competitive performance is lower than the companies that pay what they have to pay.
I’d note shittiness of the job is not a compensation decision factor. Otherwise slaughterhouse employees and social workers would be paid better than any of us.
I’m not saying ICs need to make double the pay of their manager. Really, just the tech leads need to make more and the manager should make on par with their middle tenured ICs because then ICs will feel like they have a solid career path outside of management
Working the line at McDonald's is fundamentally harder with respect to being a grind but that doesn't seem to reflect strongly on their pay. The reality is that you don't need to pay $300k/yr for a manager who is also a talented FAANG level developer.
Definitely said from someone that has never been a manager. FWIW, it's never that easy to fire someone, and it gets even more difficult when you need to worry about protected class issues.
You’re claiming that 80% of your time, 80% of your substantial pay, was spent managing the fallout of a single employee on a team of 30. It’s astonishingly inefficient and wasteful.
And while you’re emblematic of this behavior, it’s widespread in the tech industry. The vast majority of management is terrified of any sort of real conflict or intervention, so they become ineffectual and useless.
FAANGs generally don't have that problem, at least not until recently.
No shortage of kids at Stanford or MIT dreaming of GOOG bucks and name recognition, and willing to work 80 hour weeks. Hell, even with AMZN's terrible reputation I still know people @ UW Seattle chomping at the bit to get in.
Not hard to fire when it's easy to replace with solid talent. Much harder for someone like P&G or Clorox or Amtrak -- they either contract out or else get what they get.
I agree. Too often people feel becoming manager is the easiest way to advance their career (which most of the time equates to making more money). In many cases becoming manager is the only way to advance their career in the current org.
Management track is usually the only way to be in the room where decisions get made. Sure, the top engineers will be consulted and kept in the loop, but 99% of the strategy discussions and planning happens without them.
So for people with an innate need to join in the steering of the ship, there’s only one career path.
My org of 500+ has 4 groups in it. Our annual plan had 16 major priorities, 4 of them came from me (a PE, most sr eng) directly or initiatives I pulled forward. I was in the deep meetings for my direct group. I had many discussions for the 2 ideas in other groups (one was easy actually). I'm not sure how that would rate as "excluded". I gave comment on all of the org plans and priorities in the groups (many of them have a lot of priorities I'm not spun up on yet as they're well covered or out of my wheel house). I sat in the final reviews. I'm in the promo / rating meetings. Only thing I'm really not in is the budget meetings and ceremony goal reporting meetings except when needed. That seems like a plus.
This is your experience and it doesn't prove anything. I mean, the above comment clearly said "usually" and most likely that's the case. At least, from what I saw. There may be one engineer for 4-5 managers in the group.
> So for people with an innate need to join in the steering of the ship, there’s only one career path.
Not really. Some managers are perfectly willing to include IC's in this if they don't want to be/are not suitable as people-managers.
There are ways to formalize this, like creating roles for tech-leads, technical project management, enterprise architects (and a lot of others, in non-tech industries).
For managers who have their strongest talents in the social/organizational domain, this can be a win-win, if their ego allows it. In some cases, nearly all the technical and strategic work can be done by the IC, while the manager can focus on ensuring funding and support for these strategies within the organization, as well resource management and HR related work.
Of course, for every IC that has the talents and interests that make them suitable for such influence, there may be 3-4 that want that power, but do not have the abilities, initiative, flexibility or willingness to put enough effort into it to make it worthwhile for the manager.
And from the other perspective. If you're such an employee, it may be that you need to look around a bit to find a team lead by this kind of manager. It may well be that only 10-20% will be into this kind of cooperation with a subordinate.
But if you do find the right manager to support in this way, and actually do contribute to his/her getting promoted more quickly, you may have a powerful ally among the higher-ups (or even in some cases be pulled along, and given some direct-report role directly under him/her).
This is the problem I’ve been wrestling with. I’m never going to get the control I desire, unless I give up on benefiting from that control. I can’t advocate properly for myself as an IC, and even as a lead or staff engineer I’m still likely to be coaching someone who goes to the meeting instead of going myself and having much gravitas.
Only at very small companies do I get to cross these streams.
I interviewed for FB once and I don’t believe this is the case there. I was told the comp levels ran parallel for ICs and Managers. They do value their ICs it seems. This was one of the main reasons I was interested in working for them. You can see it on levels.fyi
There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track. I'll disagree with this statement by saying that I think the step function in skills between managing people and managing people who manage people is huge. There are larger gaps between M1 -> M2 -> D than IC6 -> IC7 -> IC8...
but, I think the answer depends. If you are a really strong individual contributor, I presume getting an IC promotion is easier. If you are just decent, getting an IC7+ promotion seems incredibly challenging because IC7 requires an very high level of competence. If you are just decent as a manager, you can get luckier.
It me. I’m a good Dev but was never going to be one of the greats. Making the jump to manager seemed like the next logical step… and in sone ways it has been, but it’s a very different job. (Now that I evaluate other people’s dev work, I was actually a lot better than I thought I was)
I've noticed that many of the best devs are constantly worried about their output and quality and the worst not worried at all. This is as a Sr. IC who gets pulled in to other teams on the regular.
This is the case in my company. My boss reluctantly went to the manager track as it was quite difficult to move up on the SDE track (from the level he was on) but much easier on the manager track.
Yes, absolutely this. Once you hit senior ranks in engineering at a big tech firm, it's actually very difficult to move upwards. Very few people are ever made principal engineers or senior staff or even staff level for that matter. The jump in technical ability for those levels is quite large as well and can take many years to get a single promotion since openings are pretty slim as well (some orgs will only get 1-2 staff engineers).
If you switch to becoming a manager, your salary increases a lot and you have many more opportunities for promotion. So a lot of engineers hit senior and say "screw that, I can just be a manager" which is a much easier path to high salary.
It's very common and we need to incentivize people to stay as ICs.
I really don't understand this pattern at companies. It seems entirely feasible to simply let IC's take on more responsibility. It's easier to shuffle responsibility amongst ICs compared to managers without rocking the boat - why would orgs incentivize a "fixed" management structure?
It creates the problem of too many chefs but too few cooks. Too many people discussing how to best construct a thing vs actually constructing the thing.
But do you want managers who are people who want to be managers? It seems to me that many people who want to be managers are motivated by wanting to boss people around, i.e. they want power, not necessarily money. And some don’t want to do “the work” whatever that work might be.
I really think we need more “reluctant leaders”: people who are good at leadership but don’t want to lead, and yet can be relied upon to lead because of their sense of duty, especially their duty to the team. People who say, shit, I really don’t want to do this but damnit if I don’t step up, this will be a failure.
Middle management should be like jury duty -- something assigned randomly to a team member, then served for a set period.
And company processes should be engineered so that a bad/ineffectual manager can't break them, with everything that can be devolved to the team itself.
And hiring should be done on the basis that a new employee will likely be a manager at some point.
The best managers I've had were all reluctant, so selecting against people who want to be managers seems like a great idea.
> Middle management should be like jury duty -- something assigned randomly to a team member, then served for a set period.
Please, no. A good middle manager is a shit umbrella, a bad one is a shit funnel.
Most of the ICs I've worked with would not make good managers. Not because they are bad people, but because they don't currently have the skillset to manage.
I'd rather not have them spend 6 months developing their skills by managing me, only to be replaced by the next person in line.
A bad middle manager tends to be a bad middle manager because they're empowered to do dumb things: set upcoming workload, badger people about adherence to mythical project schedule, etc.
The majority of these tasks could be devolved to the team itself, if an organization wanted to.
Without that political pressure, I'd trust even the worst IC on my team to serve in a manager role, because the consequences of them doing a poor job would be small.
Who in the rest of your organization is producing so much shit that your manager’s primary job is to be a shit umbrella? What productive purpose are those people serving if your manager’s job is effectively to work against them?
Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.
>
Who in the rest of your organization is producing so much shit that your manager’s primary job is to be a shit umbrella?
His manager, the various proxies for the customers, events outside of anyone's control.
> What productive purpose are those people serving if your manager’s job is effectively to work against them?
Everyone with power in a modern corporation is looking out for their agenda, and their interests rarely align with their peers, and even less rarely with the line people. Think of directors pursuing weird-ass pet projects, think of product managers that want to devote 0% effort on stability and 100% on features, think of some other org dumping work that they ought to be doing onto you.
Also, all of these problems exist on a much smaller, less dramatic scale, on a day-to-day in every firm that does anything of note. Everyone wants their asks done today, and its the manager's job to keep all the people asking for stuff playing by the rules, and reasonably happy, and civil.
They aren't bad people, they are just being rewarded for meeting particular goals, and they are working towards them.
> Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.
Maybe, but whether they will or not is not under the control of anyone in the trenches. The modern corporation is an authoritarian institution, and if you don't have the ear of a decision-maker, you can't exactly get someone else fired for being bad at their job. Especially when their job is telling you what to do.
A majority of them may be like this, but eventually you’ll meet that one manager that actually seems to care and goes out of their way to help you. Then you’ll realize some people that are looking to be managers are not power hungry narcissists.
The problem is that then it tends to become a sort of charity work. I've had multiple managers who essentially felt like they were burnout martyring themselves into serious problems in their life to try to support my team.
I've been blessed with generally good managers, but they've all worked way more and way harder than me for less pay and it's honestly made me feel pretty awful for them.
> It seems to me that many people who want to be managers are motivated by wanting to boss people around, i.e. they want power, not necessarily money.
I've known a few of these. Power and money, usually. Mainly because they were born with money, and think they deserve as much or more than their parents accumulated.
I wouldn't say they're the most toxic people I know, but they're in about the 85th percentile.
That already happens a fair amount. I've had two orgs where for stretches of time my top guys cleared more than I did, and I've known others in the same boat (they ran "rockstar" SME teams of various types). I wasn't offended by it either. I gave them air cover and they did exceptional work largely undisturbed, and periodically asked questions that made them not get too comfortable in the status quo. It was a fair trade off.
But ICs making more than managers is not what should be normalized; building teams with structures that optimize for performance rather than "management by spreadsheet" will get you further than just one dimensional rules about comp, especially in larger orgs where the comp tiers are deep.
That's an easy way to have zero managers and more problems than you started with. The vast majority of ICs are like children. It's not fun dealing with them. The only way one voluntarily takes on that role is for equal or greater pay.
I disagree. The vast majority of managers are nothing more than people trying to climb the bureaucratic rank and are not truly helpful in multiplying the efforts of the mid-senior ICs below them.
And that doesn't apply to ICs? I've worked with plenty of ICs just trying to show they "led a project" to make Staff or higher and did next to nothing to "multiply" any amount of effort from any other IC.
Tried management for a few years, dealing with the prima donnas and the deadweight on the team burned me out. Wasn’t getting paid more than I was as an IC, so it was not worth it for me by a long shot. As an IC I just have my own problems to worry about.
That is pretty much the whole idea of the Staff+ Engineer track that mirrors the management track. The divergence normally happens after senior engineer level.
Smart companies have been doing things like this for decades. The first company I worked for 20 years ago had distinct tracks for management and engineering staff once people got to a certain level.
1. All people who really want to be managers are good managers
Or even
2. Best managers really want to be managers
To put it another way, a lot of people would rather be IC than managers. Not all of those people would be bad managers. In fact some of those might be the best managers.
Or to put it yet another way. Everybody wants to tinker. Managing is a pain. And the higher up, the fewer of the sane people would want it :-)
I think you are partially right, in that it should be normalized that some IC's may be delivering more value than their managers, and compensation should reflect that.
The broad version, that managers just don't contribute as much as the IC's they manage, doesn't hold much water in general - but may in a dysfunctional organization.
The same way anything is normalized. One person/company does something, posts the outcomes of it, then other people follow. I don't think many companies have tested this logic out, as management style in tech is inherited from older corps.
I think this could have great benefits. If a manager's job salary is directly capped to the average of their ICs, then it's their benefit to make the best engineers and show that these engineers deserve an increase in salary - ergo the manager's salary is increased. At the same time, no one will be rushing to management just to get a salary bump.
I still don't see how you beat the market-driven salary. Don't you have to pay market rate for good managers, and market rate for good IC's?
If a company unilaterally cuts manager pay, they presumably won't get great managers, or at least not good managers who also want to be paid fairly.
It also means managers will only want to manage more senior IC's, so as to benefit from the higher salary, while it's the junior IC's who need more capable management.
You could drop manager pay and accept that it will mean "worse" managers, and perhaps hope to make up the difference by using the savings to pay more for ICs and hope that this will get you "better" ICs and the result will be better team performance overall.
I don't know how you'd ever make that change to a company structure though. The turkeys would have to vote for christmas.
I mean there are, what, millions of independently run companies in the world.
I suppose it’s possible there!s some totally novel idea nobody has tried but which would be hugely successful and revolutionize corporate practices. But I’m very skeptical there is an objectively more successful model just waiting for some company to stumble on it.
That's not "companies find they are more profitable". That's "nobody does it and it's probably because some tried and decided it was better not to, and maybe the way they decided it was better was by comparing profits".
It's fascinating as it seems like most modern problems are the result of wrong arguments being just more convincing. Like, they're. A virus well designed to exploit the most number of human logical fallacies and heuristics.
Not sure if you're intentionally demonstrating by example, but you definitely nailed it. People are suckers for "there's this one simple explanation that explains hugely complex problems."
Bell Labs is a special case (afaik). My father worked for Western Electric (and I actually did a couple summer internships there). In any case, BL / WE had a special rank and pay structure. They understood they had talent that was more valuable not as management.
I don't remember the details but do remember there being certain "heavy weights" that didn't have anyone under them.
depends, in many hospitals the administrators have to keep their licenses (doctor one day a week) and are paid more overall... so what does that make them?
