No Stupid Questions

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.

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

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.

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.

It comes down to jealousy. A manager can't possibly make less than their direct reports is a common thought process, especially when both positions are salaried. Some companies are willing to buck the trend and pay at least first or maybe second level managers less than some of their reports at times.

It's actually somewhat common for roles with commission or tips to make more than management. This also happens with roles that get paid overtime.

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 :/

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.

"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.

Because expertise doesn't always mean you get paid more. Remember life is based around your income.

They're slave drivers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"leadership" is often a euphemism for nepotism.