
Ask HN: Why are non-technical managers paid more than engineers? - throwawaywmp
This has been the standard at every software company I&#x27;ve worked at so far.<p>There are 2 open positions: Software Engineer, and Project Manager.<p>The Project Manager position is filled in 2-4 weeks. This person is offered more compensation than the engineers they&#x27;re managing. Often their skillset appears (to engineers at least) to consist only of the most basic skills required to function in an office environment. The emerging pattern is that the winning candidate is chosen based mostly on their physical presentation, and their ability to &quot;win conversations.&quot;<p>The Software Engineer position is filled in 3 months if we&#x27;re lucky, and then stays open in perpetuity, because the need for engineers outpaces the company&#x27;s ability to hire them. We screen thousands of resumes trying to find somebody who&#x27;s even worth interviewing. We hire a recruiting agency, throw money at Greenhouse, conduct on-site rounds with a 90% fail rate, and pay mid-5-figure finder fees to Triplebyte and Hired.<p>The Software Engineer has a skillset that is beyond the comprehension of most people, and is so large and varied that some part of it is even beyond the comprehension of their peers and vice-versa. There&#x27;s often a lifetime of work behind the development of that skillset, since they were in their teens or even earlier, most of it above and beyond any standard educational curriculum.<p>Software companies would seem to be one of the most (if not the most) extreme examples of supervisors being more replaceable than their direct reports in hiring.<p>So why are software companies so willing to offer more pay for a managerial role that is easy to hire for, and so unwilling to offer more pay for a technical role that is one of the hardest to hire for? Why does it seem like market forces just don&#x27;t apply here?
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Juliate
Senior engineer speaking. 20 years of experience in the software industry.

Management is knowing of to make people work together toward a common goal.

1\. A managerial role is not _easy_ to hire for if you're looking for someone
who has (for a start) correct skills & experience to manage a team (of
engineers only, or of various backgrounds).

One of their roles is to help his team focus on what they want to/can do for
everyone to succeed. That implies a lot of ingesting, structuring information
and communicate it in all directions, all of the time. You need practice, and
skills, to handle that without becoming completely numb.

2\. Technical skills aren't everything. Far from that. When hiring, it's among
the last items on my checklist. You want people to be motivated for the job,
to be capable and willing to work in a team, to be willing to learn and spread
what they learnt. What they know and can bring in total derives from that.

3\. You get 1 manager for several members of a team. And a manager also
coordinates with other managers & team members. Budget-wise, you can take and
compare the manager compensation with any one team member's compensation but
that does not make much sense.

4\. Companies success being the result of (mostly) the technical excellence of
their teams is the worst toxic professional myth I've encountered; it took me
5 years to see it and 10 more to accept it.

Purpose/strategy (know what you want) + design (know how to get there) +
logistics (know who/what to ask for it) trumps most of the rest.

The bonus is if you also have the technical skills to do it but that's not a
requirement.

Being an engineer is great, I love it. But it's far from being THE ultimate
valuable role in a company.

~~~
StriverGuy
Number 2 is so hard for a lot of engineers to grasp. Technical knowledge does
not translate to strong management skills. In fact, I would say at a certain
point deep technical expertise becomes a hinderance on your ability to manage
people.

~~~
riku_iki
technical skills are necessary to make educated decisions and judgments.
Managers on high tech projects without such skills blindly shuffle people
between roles usually base on which person is nicer to talk.

~~~
Juliate
Right. For every single person, yes.

But there are many people to make an organisation work.

There, experts provide their expertise, managers make calls (hopefully for
everyone - that's also part of their job, informed calls).

If the call was wrong, you can question & identify if it is either the
manager's judgement that was debatable, or the piece of expertise provided, or
both. And then decide what to do: change the methods, change the role, change
the teams, move the people.

If you have a single person being the expert and making the calls, all you
have is a bus number of 1.

~~~
riku_iki
All those iterations take resources from somewhere else. Manager with strong
tech skills can reduce number of mistakes and frictions significantly and
improve projects chances.

> you can question & identify if it is either the manager's judgement that was
> debatable

You are probably referring on some VP level person, so I think they usually
have even lower expertise, and will just fire manager who doesn't deliver,
which is correct, VP shouldn't dig to such low level of execution.

------
bjourne
Have you heard about the law of supply and demand? Because it is bullshit.
Salaries are not set based upon some fictional law of economics. Instead, look
to sociology and biology to explain managerial salaries. Developers may be
harder to recruit than managers but occupy a lower rung on the totem pole than
them. Hence cannot be paid more than managers. Because pay is status and
leaders have more status than followers. The more people you lead the more
status and money.

~~~
eb0la
I agree that Pay is status; but I believe with a bigger pay comes bigger
responsability.

Landing on a role with bigger responsability must be properly compensated or
you won't be able to fill the position.

~~~
paulriddle
Correct, but I'd like to point out that responsibility does not imply
consequences. If the higher-ups mess up they can blame it on those below them.
Usually it is done in an indirect way by _setting expectations_. For a lot of
people, if they are the ones setting expectations they mentally take
themselves out of the equation, assuming they are good. They might be wrong.

------
benologist
Programmer jobs are harder to fill because programmers have a long list of
personal preferences, trick questions, random algorithms to quiz your depth of
understanding on, arbitrary answers and stack-specific questions in their
arsenal for rejecting candidates. Everyone else focuses on what the job
actually entails and how much they will be making.

~~~
sevilo
I also feel like many programmers enjoy making interview questions as tricky
as they can and finding every possible reason to reject other programmers
they’re interviewing in order to appear superior in abilities. How can it be
that every company complains they cannot hire engineers fast enough, pay 10s
of thousands to outsourced recruiters and recruitment services, and yet there
are many engineers, not short of decent ones, having to go through at least
5-7 interviews in order to land one offer.

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quickthrower2
Project manager can mean different things in different companies. I've seen
PM's negotiate complex contracts with customers and as a result bring in a lot
more revenue for the company without any additional development work. For the
regular PM who's just managing internally, if they are good the should help
reduce the amount of unnecessary work from the business and have developers
working on the most crucial work. Being able to negotiate with different
'kinds' of people is a real skill, and it's not just basic office skills.

That said I think the "cushy" thing about being a PM though is there isn't a
new framework to learn next year - you can just keep building on your existing
people skills. How to win friends and influence people is more relevant and
enduring than any tech skills from the 1930's (or even the 1990's), for
example.

But overall IF they are good they are worth it. (If they are bad they cost
just as much and are much more harmful than a bad dev)

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codingdave
Accountability.

At least in theory, whether a project goes well or badly, it is the leader
that is accountable for that result. They get paid well to bring success to a
project. They get fired fast for failing.

As a dev, you typically are not held to that level of accountability. If you
do good work on a crappy project, you just get moved to a different project
when it all blows up, instead of being unemployed. So with less personal risk,
you also get less compensation.

~~~
tracer4201
This depends on where you work, including it’s org and/or team culture. I’ve
been on teams where management wanted details - what is our delivery plan (PMs
and technical leaders communicate this to more senior management and involve
engineers to ask questions, understand what’s achievable, set dates and
expectations with stakeholders, clearly define CX, write or review customer
stories, etc).

I’ve seen teams where a director level sat down with engineers to understand
the launch plan, what system metrics are/will be available, what are technical
dependencies? Does team A own them or team B? What’s the escalation path in
case of failures? Have we stress tested? Failure tested? If dependencies all
died, how resilient are our systems? Do they fail gracefully? What’s the
forecasted peak request rate? What’s our infrastructure spend? The list goes
on...

I’ve been on other teams where management is high in the clouds - strategy
only and even the immediate or other technical management refuses to get
involved in any kind of planning, estimates, or generally having any
accountability of deliverables. The couple overachievers in the engineering
team are basically the ones responsible for the success if the project
succeeds (and sometimes they’re also owning the definition of success and
success metrics). If this scares you it should.

My point being, there is certainly a broad spectrum.

These experiences are from 3 of the FAANGs.

~~~
deepaksurti
Is 1st, F or G? 2nd the commerce A? 3rd N?

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EliRivers
In my experience, a good project manager makes a good team fantastic. A bad
project manager makes a good team dysfunctional. While I can't speak for all
the project managers you work with, one who can turn a good team of more than
three or so engineers fantastic is worth significantly more than one single
good engineer.

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dschleef
> There's often a lifetime of work behind the development of that skill.

This is literally true of every senior job role.

It seems like it's mostly software engineers that don't get this.

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acesubido
> So why are software companies so willing to offer more pay for a managerial
> role that is easy to hire for, and so unwilling to offer more pay for a
> technical role that is one of the hardest to hire for?

It really depends on which part of the "software world" the company is
situated in and the value they put in engineering.

A lot of companies have this exaggerated structure to value the work done by
the project manager and business analyst (usually spec-ing out work and
abstracting customer interaction from the rest of the team). The effects of
abstracting customer interaction allows them to be valued highly, which will
make them reside on the top of the chain and get compensated accordingly. The
rest of the team doesn’t matter that much as long as they’ve got the right
qualifications to convert requirements into working code.

This stackoverflow answer will give you an idea:

[https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4577...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-
do-business-analysts-and-project-managers-get-higher-salaries-than-programme)

~~~
unimployed
Unfortunately I’ve seen most project managers, BAs, and product managers that
have no understanding of the VOC, requirements, or the engineering.

Very common:

Product managers typically come from sales/business development and can’t
articulate VOC or requirements in an intelligible way, even though that may be
a listed duty of theirs. They are great at taking their customer base to the
baseball game and knocking back a few beers, but engineering ultimately has to
collect those insights on their own.

Project managers that have only a PMP or a some kind of tangential management
qualification treat every project the same way but do not have the technical
understanding to be useful. In their eyes rushing schedules, gate clearing,
and release trumps any other concerns and often the result is shipping a turd
product with bare bones checkbox requirements (that they never actually
appreciated, understood, or cared about) that flops. But they get to claim
they navigated X number of product releases on their resume.

Business analysts possess half the knowledge they need to be competent. You
need expertise in the business, customers, products, requirements, research,
and analytics (basically a step just below the base knowledge you need to do
systems engineering without having the technicals to develop a systems
solution). You usually get someone with just enough knowledge in one area of
computer science, analytics, or business (but almost never a complete suite of
knowledge to provide useful input into the process).

Engineering is hard. It’s a mixture of multiple disciplines of knowledge and
wearing many hats. What holds back engineering salaries is that management,
sales, and business types compete with engineering to improve the bottom line,
seeking to minimize/outsource the importance of technical solutions and
maximize other methods/budgets like marketing gimmicks, cutting costs, and
inserting processes in a kludge or bureaucratic manner with the illusion of
accountability (I have never witnessed actual accountability) via their
hierarchies being closer to executives and board members who tend to have a
disproportionate influence on matters like budget for competent engineers.

I have seen enough turd products released that do insurmountable damage to a
company that I run if I detect the scent that engineering is treated as just
another resource that translates requirements into shipped products and is not
on equal footing and input as sales, business process, and management.

------
aliston
Just wanted to point out that typically in the US, the role you seem to be
describing is that of an engineering manager, not a project manager. If your
company is finding engineering managers in 2-4 weeks, it probably is not a
top-tier tech company.

At the highest paying tech companies (FANG) there are usually 3 "manager"
roles:

\- Product Manager: Interfaces between marketing, engineering and design to
manage the development of new features and products. Not necessarily a people
manager and does not directly manager engineers.

\- Project Manager: Manages scheduling, task assignment, communication between
teams, assigns bugs. Does not directly manage engineers.

\- Engineering Manager: Primarily a people manager, usually was a SWE
previously. Does manage engineers.

Of the 3, the project manager path is probably the least lucrative at the same
level. Product and engineering tend to have similar pay.

Good engineering managers have a unique blend of managerial skill AND
technical skill. On the other hand, there are lots of anti-social weirdos that
are great ICs in engineering. As a result, I'm inclined to say that supply and
demand is working pretty well.

~~~
newdaynewuser
This is the most correct answer. In my company software engineers easily make
more than project managers. People manager make a bit more than engineers but
not that much. 10-20k more.

Soure: glassdoor.com

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vladojsem
In general, in the business venue, the big share of income goes to those that
can offer some form of command and control to a business venture.

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RodgerTheGreat
Maybe the non-technical managers are better at salary negotiation than the
software engineers?

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RantyDave
Be thankful you're not a musician.

~~~
theworld572
The best comment so far!

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lonelappde
Assumption of facts not in evidence. At many companies including the biggest,
engineers are paid more than peer product/project/program managers, and most
managers are engineers also.

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dyeje
Project managers do not always make more than software engineers. In fact,
entry level PMs often make significantly less. It depends on the org and
seniority of the position really.

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smacktoward
Because they set the pay scales, and engineers aren’t organized enough to
force them to set them differently.

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SirLJ
The managers are more valuable to the company than the engineers...

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mc110
I actually think a lot of Project Managers do a good job, and are valuable,
but surprised nobody has mentioned David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs theory.

That is documented at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)
and [https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-
dav...](https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-david-
graeber-occupy-wall-street-karl-marx).

It specifically mentions "taskmasters" who manage/create work for others, and
project managers might be put into that category by some (but again, not by me
as a general rule).

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gamechangr
Scale

