
Many engineers are far more valuable than their managers - kungfudoi
https://www.ifsecglobal.com/security-skills-crisis-engineers-valuable-managers-salaries/
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nul_byte
This rings true. I know a good number of folk who took management as some sort
of defacto career path, without really having anything unique or special to
bring to the role. A lot of them being former engineers themselves, begin to
lose their technical knowledge and retreat into working with spreadsheets and
powerpoint presentations. You then have a situation where they are completely
reliant upon engineers telling them what is really happening in a project, and
what the way forward should be.

Management really should be equal in pay and prestige as to a project manager
or senior HR person, but instead they end up being seen as higher up the
hierarchy and privy to information on what is happening behind the scenes,
until they eventually communicate that down to the engineering teams beneath
them.

~~~
dukeluke
I feel your post downplays the role of manager. They're needed to make sure
everyone's doing their job, business needs are being met, and communication is
made between the workers and executives. Having an experienced engineer play
the role of management makes the communication between highly technical
engineers and highly abstract executives much smoother.

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pcurve
Where I work, most senior engineers report into managers that have same pay
grade. This squashes any allure of switching to managerial track for more
money, because in many cases, it's not.

You can crap on managers all you want, but a big chunk of their job is soul-
crushing work that most engineers wouldn't touch with 10 foot poles.

With that said, it doesn't have to be one or the other. There are IT managers
that are highly effective as people manager and are technical. They are rare
breeds, yet they're paid the same as managers that are not very technical.

By the time they get recognized and promoted, they're saddled with too big a
team and responsibilities that their technical skill is no longer of much use.

~~~
js8
Where I work it is kinda similar, but the fact still is that becoming a
manager is often faster way to get promoted. Partly because, exactly as you
say, not many people want to do it.

They recommend pay drop in the article as a solution, but nobody really wants
that, despite the fact that it would often be meritocratic. I think human
societies ultimately do not want meritocracy too much.

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BigChiefSmokem
Perfect! Now I have a link I can send to all those recruiters that think I
don't know what my market rate is. As a full-stack, dbadmin, devops, product
management veteran engineer working on everything from Sitecore to virtual
reality I consistently make as much if not more than my managers and I am not
shy about letting everyone from HR up to executive management know.

Always be true to your skills. Know what you're worth and go out and get what
you're worth - I learned that from watching Rocky.

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ac29
This is true for more than just engineers. I've done project management in QA
where some Analysts working on my projects made more money than I did, and
they were completely worth it.

Being a manager is really a unique skill in and of itself, which is why so
many managers aren't that great -- especially when they were promoted from the
position they go on to manage (see the Peter Principle [0]).

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

~~~
pcurve
I have nothing but respect for effective project managers. You couldn't pay me
enough to their work.

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joezydeco
Kawasaki’s Law of Pre-Money Valuation: for every full-time engineer, add
$500,000; for every full-time M.B.A., subtract $250,000.

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js8
The problem is that free market is not meritocracy, and in fact it cannot be.
The free market cannot impose any kind of moral values on people, because it
is at its heart a symmetric game between people.

Let's say there is some job (like engineering) that society considers
valuable. So the people, who do it, can be proud, because they are doing what
is considered to be a valuable job. Then free market can deal with the
situation in two ways:

\- These people are valuable, so they should be paid more.

\- These people already intrinsically prefer doing work they consider
valuable, so they can be paid less.

So you see, it's perfectly symmetric; free market cannot enforce any sort of
moral values that people already don't have. That's why it cannot be
meritocratic, unless the underlying society is.

And in current U.S., the underlying morality is very much based on hierarchy
in companies, which actually seems to be pretty default human behavior.

~~~
Chris2048
I don't really understand. Can't an engineers simply go to another company,
and still be doing the same kind of work that they like? Can't they threaten
to move, if if they don't really want to, so not to devalue themselves?

~~~
js8
The problem is both parties can do that, company can simply find another
engineer or can threaten with that too.

It's that people have been conditioned to see the first option when they learn
about free markets and not the second option.

~~~
Chris2048
> company can simply find another engineer

But then they open themselves to supply/demand of the market, and the risk of
being short-staffed (the risk of being unemployed might not be as great,
because a business may be in active competition, and lose opportunities).
Plus, I imagine the overhead of _new_ staff bites too; and it's not common to
under-pay new staff in their probationary period.

But my original point was; An Engineer who enjoys their work can avoid being
paid less simply because of this fact.

~~~
js8
There is also a risk involved in changing jobs, though.

> An Engineer who enjoys their work can avoid being paid less simply because
> of this fact.

I think he can provided that he either:

\- Works for someone who is not a psychopath but a decent human being, that
is, not being entirely rational in the economic sense.

\- Hides the fact that he enjoys it and would probably do it even for less
money from the employer. (But this eventually transpires through salary raises
or their absence.)

Note that either of those assumptions is breaking the assumptions of the
rational decision-making in the free market.

I think people within the profession can do that to an extent, but for the
whole profession (or a subset) it's much harder.

So for example, game programmers are paid less than typical programmers,
because they are enjoying it more. And programmers (software engineers) are
paid less than managers because again, on average, they enjoy the job more. Or
look at a typical teacher or scientist.

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geebee
I agree, and I'd go one step farther. This post warns of the risk of "Gaining
a bad manager, losing a good engineer"

I actually think companies should even be concerned about "gaining a _good_
manager, losing a good engineer."

There's this notion that it's better to be a good engineer than a bad manager,
and that wage ceilings that force engineers to become managers even if they
aren't good at it are harmful. This, I agree with. But you know, I actually
thing there may be harm even if the engineer is a _good_ manager. Truth is, in
many instances a top engineer is harder to find, harder to develop, and
creates more wealth than a top manager. In short, if someone is really good at
both, even then you might be better off leaving that person in engineering.

Usually the very best engineers do end up as leaders of sorts. However, these
engineers tend to lead loose and informal groups of other talented people,
often coordinating complicated work that requires deep understanding of the
technology and domain. They often resist the "management" title, and they are
generally uninterested (perhaps opposed to) tasks like handling vacation
requests or writing performance reports.

Why you'd take a person like this out of the deep engineering role and put
them into a formal "management" role that can be filled by a much larger pool
of workers is beyond me.

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sunstone
In the old (not so long ago) military days there were the educated and trained
officers directing the enlisted men who were trained to the extent necessary.

This model was then repurposed to direct commerical enterprise and while those
enterprises consisted of a composite of simple tasks (eg manufacturing) things
worked pretty well. The knowledgeable people in charge of the less
knowledgeable.

However when the tasks become much more complex such as science based
enterprises (eg pharmaceuticals and engineering) the model fails.

You still need someone to "be in charge", that is, to organize things at a
higher level but now the knowledge required to do that is much lower than the
knowledge required to do the actual work. And yet the sense still persists
that the organizer role is a "higher" position in the organization.

Consequently you have situations where a young MBA (for example) is organizing
a team of PhD's where he/she thinks they are the "the boss" rather than "the
organizer" of the team. And this naturally, can lead to dissension. Health
care for example suffers from a lot of this.

For these organizations its time to drop the military model and come up with a
more practical abstraction with a better mapping to reality.

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anotherevan
I think my personal confirmation bias meter just burnt out.

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desireco42
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am glad we are talking about this.

Nothing against managers. Just have impression engineers are heavily
undervalued.

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5706906c06c
True, and their managers are the ones that recognize the engineer's
importance.

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jvanderbot
Managers are the business API. Engineers are the core functionality.

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segmondy
This is true, but a good manager is worth more than many engineers.

~~~
harry8
"This is true _and_ a good manager is worth more than many _bad_ engineers."
\--Might be more correct

~~~
spyrosg
For a one-man project, sure. Otherwise, the grand-parent is right.

To achieve anything hard you'll need a team of engineers. That single good
manager is going to be the one that attracts and retains those good engineers.
You need few good managers but they're much harder to find.

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sebleon
Ha, this is part of a well-known phenomenon where people are promoted until
they're bad at their job. Decoupling pay from title definitely makes sense!

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bwb
If you have a bad manager for sure.

But otherwise, it is like saying a car is more valuable when it lacks a
steering wheel and seat belts.

~~~
Etheryte
You don't need a steering wheel if the car is engineered to drive itself
though.

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tehlike
except, you don't see engs getting pouched for tens/hundreds of millions of
dollars.

