Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
56 points (98.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
48547 readers
566 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
"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.
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 :/
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.
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.
Your last paragragh describes a leader...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
"Manglement". I like that. I'm gonna start using that to refer to the incompetent leadership at my workplace.
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 decisions
A 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.
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.
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.
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?
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. They control the means of production.
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 because the boss doesn't understand all that technical stuff. Toss in some Dunning-Kruger for good measure too.
Get rid of the boss and decide how to do things democratically among your peers? Now you've seized the means of production.
You still need leadership in any system.
Eve your argument "seize the means of production" only happens with leadership.
"leadership" is often a euphemism for nepotism.
Because nepo babies at top levels think they are good leaders first and leadership is the best thing ever.
Because bosses always want to make more money than the people they're bossing. But, also because leadership is responsible, I (engineer) wouldn't want to take the responsibilities of my boss for the same pay.
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. Of course, that creates problems of its own, but business are dumb.