Pretty much every company I’ve been in or know of values a vertical trajectory instead of a horizontal one for its employees i.e becoming a manager nearly always means a faster salary progression than becoming an expert in one or multiple fields.
Why is expertise valued less?
At the end of the day, a single person can only do so much work. All the experience in the world doesn’t change that there is only 24hrs in a day.
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
Leaders are force multiplier, and good ones should be compensated as such.
Sadly, we also over compensate the shitty leaders far too often as well :/
Leadership is undoubtedly important and good leadership even more so, but why do you bring singularity (“one person can only do so much work”)? Experts work in teams too. Is there some kind of connotation with expertise that leads you (or people) to believe that is something which cannot be brought into a team?
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
That is true, but isn’t the ability of the team members important too? For example, if you have a team of juniors, you can get to a goal, however the question is in what state. And if the leader is just a leader but doesn’t have understanding of the sector, why should their leadership be valued more than that of the team members who do?
As for force multipliers, experts can be force multipliers too. An expert that helps out and resolves (or even prevents) tricky situations for fellow team members (or the entire team) can improve team cohesion and productivity. Experts also often have an educative role in the team to spread knowledge and understanding. That seems to be valued less, and I don’t understand why.
All your examples involve teams, and teams don’t typically happen without some form of leadership from someone. An expert without leadership skills will be far less effective at building a team around them than someone with the expertise and the leadership skills.
The expert your describing in your last paragragh IS a leader. If they aren’t being compensated as such, thats just them being exploited, and they need to advocate for more appropriate compensation.
Are you just unlucky in your experiences? Expert team leads can absolutely make as much as managers.
But there’s a convergence as you spend more and more time making decisions and directing others that you will effectively be a manager.
I used to scoff at the idea of “leaders” until I experienced good leadership and learned the difference between lead and manage.
I suspect a lot of people here think they mean the same thing.
Here’s a point though; to build vertical experience as an expert I’m starting to suspect that one would be less subject to changing companies.
Whereas leaders have no need to stay in place and change more often.
And one typically increases their compensation package much faster via changes of employer.
Just my thoughts contemplating that I just reached the low bar on my function band as a coe lead after 8 damn years into the function. Loyalty isn’t rewarded.
Leadership takes effort and focus.
Having worked in orgs where everyone is expected to lead at different times, I can tell you that leading takes effort and focus - that’s effort and focus that’s not spent on your area of expertise.
Good leaders spend all their effort on making a team work better - no different than a good coach.
There’s 24h in a day for leaders too. A leader cannot achieve infinite output by being infinitely good, just like an expert cannot achieve infinite output by being infinitely good.
Expertise is also a force multiplier.
A single expert in a team of juniors can do so much more. Because it can delegate the junior work to the juniors while doing only expert work. Thus ending up with more expert work done.
Your last paragragh describes a leader…
A single expert in a team of juniors can do so much more. Because it can delegate the junior work to the juniors while doing only expert work.
This part is definitely true but I think it misses the point. A single expert can be a force multiplier, or they can be overbearing dead weight. There is the possibility a technical expert wants to micromanage and see every step as it is done (thus holding up work that can be done while the expert is elsewhere).
I conjecture that those skills and attributes that separate the two experts we’ve described is what “good leadership” consists of.
I would never trust a leader who has no technical skills, but neither would I trust a leader who has only technical skills.
You can also have shit leaders that micromanage. What even is your point?
Being a technical expert != being a good leader
There are a set of skills and attributes that enable one to leader well. An ideal leader will have both technical skills and leadership capability, but it is possible for each to exist independently in a person.
High level and well paid experts do exist, particularly in tech companies. The reason it’s rare is because actual expertise requires both talent and effort. Very few people qualify.
Management is also a skill. And it’s arguable a more useful skill since it’s more transferable than a narrow focus. At very high levels you have a lot of responsibility figuring out where your company is headed.
Also traditional companies don’t typically have knowledge based employees. There’s a limit to what high expertise can bring. This is what has led to management as the promotion track.
I the pre-Jack Welch America, it was very common to have highly-skilled, very senior technical people making almost as much (and in some cases, more) than the CEO or the company president. This included architects, lawyers, accountants, engineers and any person that was deemed invaluable to the company.
Fuck Jack Welch and fuck MBAs.
Also it’s important to clarify that leadership and management are different things.
Good leaders keep a team working together, motivated, going in the right direction - good management ensures a team prioritizes the tasks involved in going that direction.
Also traditional companies don’t typically have knowledge based employees. There’s a limit to what high expertise can bring. This is what has led to management as the promotion track.
That is true, but you can become an expert in multiple things. For example you become an expert brick layer and then you become an expert plumber, and so on. Or in a knowledge based company, you become an expert payroll accountant, then an expert tax accountant, then an expert revenue accountant, etc.
Management is also a skill. And it’s arguable a more useful skill since it’s more transferable than a narrow focus. At very high levels you have a lot of responsibility figuring out where your company is headed.
So people value knowing where to go more than being able to get there? Is this the gist of it? If so, why? I don’t understand why one is more important than the other. You can have the best plan on the planet, but if you don’t have the people to get you there quickly, safely, and in top shape, that plan is just that, a plan.
A good plan with average people can still succeed. You’ve built a mediocre house. It has some value.
A bad plan with the best people will fail. You’ve built the wrong house. It’s worthless.
That’s the thing with management, they have impact beyond themselves.
Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?
The value of experience is logarithmic. You’re going to learn far less in the tenth year of doing something than the first year. Since management usually doesn’t start at year one, they are still in the part of the curve that rises faster.
Also, a lot of the value in higher levels of experience is usually management adjacent, like knowing what order to perform different tasks on a project and identifying when there may be issues beforehand. Someone who remains an individual contributor isn’t going to be providing value for technical roles adjacent to management.
Because you are mistaking technical skill with people skills.
People who go up manglement chains have people skills. You don’t want your middle manglement making decisions that technical people make.
Ideally you want a balance of both, pure people skills ends with poor technical decisions, pure technical ends with inability to get the other employees on board.
Id rather they leave the technical decisions to the people they literally hire to do technical stuff, not the people they hire to do people stuff.
The direction a company should go in is a technical decision. It has to come from a leader of some kind, and if that leader is non technical or disconnected from the employees, that’s how you get poor decisions.
Using MySQL vs mariadb is not a managerial decision. Using Debian over Fedora is not a managerial decision.
Using Service Now over Top desk is a managerial decision.
That is what I mean when talking about technical people making technical decisionsA good manager points the org in a direction and let’s those hired for roles do their job in working to that objective.
Agreed, those arent high level manager decisions, but they aren’t intern decisions either. They’ll be made by a mid level manager or team lead.
The higher up the chain, the less technical and more general the decisions get, but they do still need to have some level of technical understanding, or the direction they point you in could be completely detached from reality.
“Manglement”. I like that. I’m gonna start using that to refer to the incompetent leadership at my workplace.
Maybe we’re misunderstanding each other. I’m not talking about technical people going up the ladder. I’m asking why going up the ladder is valued more than becoming or being an expert on the ground.
Impact and risk.
Farther up the chain your decisions have broader impact, good or bad. Those kinds decisions have more value than decisions that have a much narrower range of effect.
As what my industry calls an SME(subject matter expert), at most my decisions effect one or two systems at a time, while a leadership decision impacts 10 or 100 (or more) people’s focus/direction. This includes the risks - so their decisions have a much broader scope.
2 things come to my mind
- Social pressure - There’s a need to be “seen”. Being a technical expert on ground doesn’t make you " seen".
- Money - The higher you go, the more money you make.
- Social pressure - There’s a need to be “seen”. Being a technical expert on ground doesn’t make you " seen".
Ah yes, exposure 🤔 So maybe by making technical experts seen, it would normalise increasing their salary.
- Money - The higher you go, the more money you make.
I’m questioning why this is the case ;)
Its just too many things packaged and loaded in that question. Haha
If you are a brilliant engineer, you might build an amazing feature. But if you are a director managing 5 teams of 8 engineers, your decisions affect the output of 40 people. Even a small 1% improvement in their efficiency multiplies across the whole group, resulting in massive financial impact.
If a VP makes a strategic mistake, an entire product line gets canceled, and 200 people lose their jobs. Higher pay is often a premium for taking on that personal and financial risk.
On the flip side, traditional corporate structure puts a cap on individual value. They operate like early 20th century assembly line, where a deeply technical engineer is seen no different than a blue collar drone.
As for the “being seen” situation, its not about being seen by your bosses. Its more about being seen by your family and friends. At least in certain cultures, “man of the house” is expected to weild power over others outside their house too. While some are OK being called potty as long as they’re paid forty, not everyone subscribes to it.
Money, power. Most people want to climb said ladder, so suck up to those higher to gain a foothold.
I have worked for one truly amazing leader in my time. He earned my complete 100% trust and commitment. I don’t think its possible to fully get the value a leader can bring to a team until you have a really good (or great) one.
Expertise takes effort to train/learn, but we know how to do it.
Leadership is much more difficult to teach, some would go so far as to say you can’t really teach it - it’s either innate in somone or they learned it through life.
As a very technical person who values expertise, even I recognize that leadership is more valuable because good leadership is rare.
Problem being is that I don’t see us rewarding good leadership, so much as rewarding having a huge ego and being a sociopath.
Generally the most well rewarded executives I’ve dealt with provided no actionable leadership, but claimed they were amazing leaders while tossing out useless pointy haired boss fodder. Last week was in a meeting where someone was stating plainly what we needed to do about something and the executive cuts him off mid sentence to say “we need to figure out what we need to do and then do it”. Yes, we were in the middle of that but he needed to interject to claim that it was his idea. He cut off another team describing what they did and he said “why didn’t you just use ai? It would be done already and you wouldn’t need the people working on it”. Note this was a very very AI heavy team already, because he had already mandated it and he thinks they are lying because things aren’t magically happening.
I’ve occasionally seen good leadership, With actionable awareness of the customer and work and ability to keep things on track and not fall into the trap of just spewing business jargon. Usually they get undermined by some incompetent who sees them as a threat and the upper tier is infested by people who deal with the hollow jargon and thus will tend to believe a fellow jargon speaker. So they get sidelined or quit.
People management is harder than it seems. Getting the people working for you to be happy and high performing is not hard but balancing those needs across a whole team becomes challenging. 5 people trying to coordinate a schedule is really tough - ask any gaming group about availability. A big 15 person team is more than 3 times as hard.
Leadership is also much harder to learn than experience. Experience is just surviving the ordeal and knowing how to get through it better. It’s persistence and observation as you solve the problems as they pop up.
Leadership is knowing who to talk to, how to appeal to a person, how to read social cues and pick up on unspoken behavior. A team member is equally capable of building the team as they are of poisoning the team. Good leaders can recognize talent and temperament that gels with the existing people. You’re effectively picking other peoples’ friends. (And not such good friends that no work gets done)
Experience can be taught. Leadership has to be learned.
And yet not everyone can become a nuclear engineer or rocket scientist, programm architect, lawyer and so on, so your “experience can be taught, leadership has to be learned” falls apart pretty quickly.
Leadership is not in anyway less then any other job that you can become an expert in. It is just focused on social sciences instead of engineering for example and both can be taught. It’s dumb to say that leadership is something special, its just that it is the more accessible of fields that have a high skill ceiling as it is present in pretty much every work environment.
Tldr, I think your end point is dumb, but I do agree that people management is hard and is definitely a skill. The best leaders are experts in their own right and it is just a matter of contextualising leadership as a skill you can become an expert in.
Because at some point expertise is worth less than leadership. One person with expertise is still just one person, they can’t usually achieve anywhere close to the same results as a team of people with good leadership. Leadership is a multiplier of expertise.
If having a leader gives idk 10% productivity…
“… anywhere close to the same result…” implies that experts are insanely disorganized and can’t cooperate.
We often are.
I’ve had great leaders, and they really can be a force multiplier, by allowing experts to focus on their area of expertise.
Good leaders promote cohesiveness and keep a team pointed in the right direction - much like a team coach. They focus on strategy and smoothing the rough edges between players.
Until you’ve experienced this it’s hard to see - and I say this as a rough-edged expert who’s experienced both excellent and mediocre leaders.
Sure but “multiplier” by 10x or 1.1x?
IMO managers/bosses are there to take care of the anoying little things so the workers can focus on work. Workers can do all that and even organize amongst themselves (most of workers can). And there are thousands other variables. Question is of pay, so the question is of worth. IMO a manager is not always more worth then a worker, and I wonder how often one is.
Disclaimer: I worked construction and a bit of sales, not an office job.
Correction: 1.1x, not 0.1x.
Good leadership is dearly needed in the world and so we pay for even the hope that someone might be. Technical skills are important, but not as important
“Leadership” is a nebulous identifier that enables corporation CEO’s to get huge, gigantic, colossal monetary bonuses for very little work actually accomplished. If a company ends up with good staff and good employees it somehow gets attributed to the CEO, even though they are the furthest removed from the process.
Managers and such get more facetime with their higher management which gets them access to better pay. VPs and the higher tier can see how much they get paid themselves so its easier to pay lower leadership more by comparison, while workers and experts are more removed and are limited to the managers budget
The higher you get up in a company, the more it will be about running the company instead of what the company does in detail. While we all have our gripes with middle and upper management, such a structure will come naturally with a growing company. Really small companies often have owners and management, who are themselves experts in the field. For bigger companies that is not really achievable and not even wanted, since management has a lot to manage.
When you become an expert and want to climb the latter, then some management will automatically come to you. You will be asked to lead colleagues more junior than you. You will be asked to manage strategy for your field of expertise. You will be asked to assess the effort needed to handle projects and the risk assiciated with them. This already means quite some management work. The reward is, that (if you do a good job) those under you will be able to do a better job and that they have time to themselves become experts by doing the technical work.
Thats my current situation. In my IT job I have to do all of the above to guide the project into success while giving some of the technical work to those more junior. For some this is good. Though I personally probably won’t go much further into management positions, because I don’t like that work enough.
There are a lot of good comments but there is a bigger reason.
Marketing and negotiation are softer skills that many technical professionals don’t have or appreciate.
Therefore they don’t market themselves properly (make people value their contributions) nor negotiate the best package for themselves.
In my experience, technical people with those skills quickly rise past their non-technical peers.
In my experience, technical people with those skills quickly rise past their non-technical peers.
They aren’t held back by the org that limits technical salaries and request that they take on leadership responsibilities?
An org that limits individual contributor salaries loses it’s individual contributors to companies that don’t. Senior principal engineers and principal engineers frequently make VP and Senior VP level salaries. If they aren’t, the talent leaves.
The company is not paying you for the amount of expertise. It is paying for how much money you will make them. If you limit your work to only what you can do yourself (without leading others), then you have deminishing returns. Only because I can now solve very complex problems because of my expertise, I cannot do 10x the work. Time is limited, expertise won’t bring you more of it. Leading will help other do their work better and faster, so you will be more valuable with that.
From the owners’ (shareholders’) point of view, managers are on their side to extract values from workers. Of course there are more nuances in real life, but that’s a more plausible explanation than any of the meritocracy ones.
