No Stupid Questions

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Because it takes a lot more than expertise to get anything done at large scale.

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.

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.

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

Nobody values actual competent leadership, they just pretend they do, they cosplay that that's what they're into.

People value kissing up to your boss, being type A, being faux-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, their delusions.

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 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

Because leaders are the ones who decide what is valuable.

Because leadership ability is much easier to fake.

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 :/

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.

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.

Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"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