Submitted 3 weeks ago by atro_city@fedia.io to [deleted]
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?
Because people don’t really think about it as much as they should. Leadership is easier to fake than expertise.
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.
Nobody values actual leadership, they just pretend they to, they cosplay that that’s what they’re into.
People value kissing up to your boss, being type A, jovial, having no life outside of work, being attractive and charming, and most importantly, having connected friends.
MBAs are the idiots who couldn’t actually learn real math or some subset of practical applied physics, but wanted to be important in a business.
They’re the ones who just make up bullshit and believe it untill it becomes reality. This generates not so much technical debt, as literal debt, malinvestment, capital misallocation, financial risk.
But, they don’t pay that risk, they fire everyone to pay for their mistakes.
And then when they do that, that is called ‘leadership’.
Why is this the paradigm?
Because our society is deeply, deeply corrupt and fradulent, all the way through.
Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?
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.
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.
Visibility
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.
“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
Money, power. Most people want to climb said ladder, so suck up to those higher to gain a foothold.
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.
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 staying 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.
Leadership isn’t that hard to teach: find any band, raid group, DnD group or scout troop and you’ll have a high feedback learning environment for leaders and followers.
There are also several programs teaching a variety of leadership skills.
What’s difficult is that much business isn’t actually interested in leadership but productivity and control (management), yet conflate the terms.
Because it takes a lot more than expertise to get anything done at large scale.
That doesn’t explain why leadership is valued more.
That’s an argument for both existing. Without leadership the expertise won’t be harnessed, without expertise, leadership means nothing.
Putting it this way, project management is a skill that requires expertise. Lots of Laborers have the expertise to be the subcontractor, not all of them succeed at being the contractor/foreman.
The majority of disfunction in workplaces seems to be that the middle managers don’t have the skills to be there either or they’d have probably been promoted up the ladder even further already
I agree that exec compensation is nuts and most exec leaders arent all that unusually skilled.
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.
Because leadership is the key to accessing expert labor. Capital interfaces with leadership leadership interfaces with experts. Experts are lower on the totem pole. We never stopped being a feudal society. Some of the rules changed around capital but the existing power structures absorbed them
“Carl over here is really good at making wheels. But he’s only made the 4 of them. Won’t make any more unless we give him a reason to… Ideas?”
Annnnnd 5000 years later; mortgages, wage slavery, and “let’s have an all hands to realign with our core paradigm”
None of that is because of middle managers. No matter what, someone will need to job of coordinating with various departments, prioritizing tasks, selling ideas, motivating, and overall being good at coordinating. Idk if I’ve personally met a manager good at those things, but I know I would be worse at it.
It doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t have the ability to influence people and get your good plan/product/idea executed
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
“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.
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
It’s a lot easier, more reliable to promote your son to VP than Senior [blank] Engineer. Also, for some weird reason we could never have predicted if we wanted to create a more efficient and equitable system, the people who decide salary decided they should have the biggest salary by a lot.
Because we didn’t seize the means of production
What does this mean?
The structure and values of the underlying society revolve around individuals amassing power and wealth for their own benefit rather than any kind of collective good. Often the boss, the owner, the one in charge leans on their wealth and power. They were born with resources or hoarded them and feel that the most valuable contribution anyone could make is risking their own wealth (investing). As such, they themselves deserve most of the control of the organization (company) and deserve to be rewarded with most of the fruits of their worker’s labor.
If you have good social skills and exude confidence - this comforts the boss. Now the boss likes you and you get promoted and more money. If you are capable of doing great work but don’t know how to kiss the boss’s ass or don’t make the boss believe you know what you are doing - you aren’t as obviously valuable to the boss.
Get rid of the boss and decide how to do things democratically among your peers? Now you’ve seized the means of production.
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.
This is a better question than it first seems, mostly because I think there’s two questions in there.
From a business perspective, you want well compensated managers so they don’t steal from you.
(Slightly) Less cynically: managers work with maximising business outputs, their job is to align, optimise and synergise production at lowest cost. They would argue that they enable more value than most individual contributors and that their slice of the added value thus becomes larger.
As for why that trajectory is pushed, I believe that is an emergent phenomenon, not designed, as a consequence of that compensation structure, and the transferability of management skills.
There is also the status aspect, in all groups, the leader has more status (=better), but the trajectory goes beyond acting leader (you don’t always have the same positive view of your bosses boss) so that will only push you to the next step, but that might be enough to create the ladder.
Philosophically, a business doesn’t actually need any particular expert or manager, it needs a competitive advantage. This could be through the best parts, but could just as well be through better design, marketing, sales, costs, or pricing.
If the pay scale was fair, you’d want to be someone who adds capability: can you produce 2x as the other technicians? Then you’d be capped at just under 2x base salary. Can you make the product sell where it otherwise couldn’t? You’re now capped only by the total profits.
That capability is probably easiest to get and sustain through management/organising skills, but a virtuoso technician, inspired designer, genius marketer or wizard salesman could also carry the business.
Weil Kapitalismus primär ein Verteilungs- und Anreizwerkzeug ist, kein Qualitätsgenerator. Allerdings sehen wir, wie das System beginnt sich selbst zu verdauen, wie es jedes noch so gut gemeinte System tut, sobald es einseitig bespielt wird und kippt.
“leadership” is often a euphemism for nepotism.
There are a lot of
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?
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.
If you have those skills, you can apply them to yourself. You can make people value your contributions enough to pay you for them. You can convince people to give you the chance to make larger contributions to the company.
If you can get that kind of experience and are technical enough to identify an emerging idea, you can convince a banker or investor to help you start a business.
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.
Most technically minded peoole can study marketing or negotiating and become proficient at it.
Its not hard or complicated, compared to their technical skillset.
But it would be a waste of their time, because their minds can quite literally be put to better uses.
And, it would require them to be ok with lying and being deceptive as a job, so they might have moral objections.
Marketing is literally using psychology to gaslight people into buying things or believing dubious things.
Negotiating is half decorum and half lying, correctly.
Most technically minded people innately work that out very quickly… its not that they don’t appreciate these skills, its that they actively find them disdainful.
Doesn’t seem to bother MBAs or HR or Marketing though, I guess its all relative to them.
I’m retired from a technical field. I know lots of folks that hold this opinion.
I have also seen excellent technologies and fortunes wasted because technological experts thought that marketing and finance weren’t important. They thought that because their technology was better than anything else, people would want it.
People are busy. Marketing is required to give people a chance to understand what they might get if they spend their time and money on your product.
Finance and leadership are needed to build and fund the human machine that is the company producing the product.
Because managers only understand leadership (if they understand anything at all). Expertise is for underlings.
Broader reach and generally more responsibility.
I’m definitely on the “expertise” track at work and have specifically avoided management because it simply doesn’t mesh with my skillset or lifestyle. At my company at least, the people getting the calls late in the evening or over weekends are the managers. They are the ones that have to deal with scheduling conflicts, budget overruns, or fixing the big issues.
While execs make a lot and probably don’t have the big stress, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for middle management. They often don’t make that much more and IME are the most stressed group at a company.
Because leadership isn’t leadership, it’s a boss. It’s someone who controls you. It’s someone who controls your money. If they control the money, they get to take more of it. Doing the work of organizing other people is valuable work, but no more valuable than the work that those people are doing. It’s not about value, it’s about power.
The people doing (or ordering) the hiring don’t want to be bothered with “low level” problems, so they want leaders that can deal with them. That’s why middle management exists.
CameronDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
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 :/
atro_city@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
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?
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.
CameronDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
All the answers are bullshit. The real explanation is that leaders set salaries. Of course they’re going to value themselves over others. Then they’re going to rationalise it with the bullshit you see in this thread about “force multipliers” etc… it’s basic capitalism. It’s the same reason politicians in the us have free healthcare and great vacation and benefits and salaries rising above inflation, the people who control these things always make sure they get what’s fair then make excuses for why no one else does.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
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.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
I hate when people use “also” and “as well” in the same sentence, and I die inside when I catch myself doing it. Not hating on you, just suffering flashbacks.
kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Why?
CameronDev@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I am not a good sentencer :(
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
CameronDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Your last paragragh describes a leader…
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
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.