Well, I agree that a good manager is very valuable, and that being a good manager is a different skill from being a good developer. Some people can do both well, but in my experience this is a minority. The
Peter Principle certainly applies in my workplace, for example, and in some cases I suspect the
Dilbert Principle may also be at work.
So yes, I agree that good management skills should be valued and rewarded, but I would also say that bad managers should not be rewarded. The problem is that a good manager will help their entire team to do better, but a good team will also help a bad manager to do better, so how do you decide who is really a good manager?
In any case, many organisations lack any kind of career progression for technical staff, so the only way to earn more (to support your family, save for retirement etc) is to move into management. This creates a perverse incentive for people who are good at one thing to be drawn into a completely different skill area, regardless of their aptitude or genuine enthusiasm for doing so. Organisations effectively create their own Peter Principle
Test Case Generator.
Your point about job-title inflation is well made, but this is really just a reflection of the way "manager" roles are over-valued and over-rewarded in many organisations. The massive growth in CEO pay compared to average salaries over the last 30 years has not been matched by similar improvements in the overall health or productivity of the companies they run, for example. At the same time, the corporate cult of the Great Leader, combined with the decidedly mixed quality of many managers (see above), encourages the delusion that if you wave enough cash around eventually you'll find "someone to lead us ... some brave Apollo", and this mentality cascades down the corporate food-chain to the lowliest SCRUM master and HR wonk, ensuring the culture persists regardless of the evidence.
arulk pillai wrote:...good employers tend to focus more on the team/culture fit...
I'm not so sure about this, as my own experience is that this is a two-edged sword. Yes, it can be very productive to build a good team who work well together and complement each other's skills, but "team fit" can actually just be code for "people who are just like us".
See
Guess who doesn't fit in at work.
My own organisation has strong policies to encourage diversity in recruitment and is genuinely very concerned to eliminate prejudice in the workplace. But the management culture and promotion system has a very strong implicit bias towards "team fit": people who get promoted tend to be the ones who fit in with the existing management culture, rather than those who might challenge that culture in productive ways. This leads to
group-think and general inertia among managers, who are often resistant to change, risk-averse and scared of taking individual responsibility for decisions.
So "team fit" only works if you already have a positive team culture that is worth reinforcing. And it can lead to a lot of covert and unconscious discrimination against people who are "not like us".
My own view is that diversity in the workplace is far more important than homogeneity, as well as being a lot more interesting and fun. I'm suspicious of organisations that place too great an emphasis on "team fit", but maybe that's just evidence of the fact that I'm a misfit anyway!
. It demands great leadership, people, & technical skills to build good teams. It is not a trivial task to build very collaborative and motivated team cultures. This is why good employers tend to focus more on the team/culture fit and your passion for your chosen profession with open ended questions, coding/collaboration sessions, HR interviews & psychometric tests to asses your attitude & characteristics. Just being a good coder will not cut it in large enterprises.
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