> If any manager can make 100 developers more 10% more efficient, but only a few people who have any ability to be a developer at all, then the developers are w

> If any manager can make 100 developers more 10% more efficient, but only a few people who have any ability to be a developer at all, then the developers are worth more. Then you'd expect fewer developers, and fewer managers overall. Unless you hit some really low threshold (e.g. 5 developers, so the same manager is only worth 50% an IC) where the cost of manager doesn't "pay back" in developer-headcount-reduction, it'd still follow the same strategy. And of course, the amount of "pay-back" you get from a manager would naturally be how one derives their value, and thus their paycheck. But IC --> Manager as the only promotion track is completely unnecessary, and generally a mistake. That's just intentionally driving into the peter principle (promoted to the level of their incompetence), because you've simply left no other way to go. Usually you have the alternate track for IC's expanding into larger/more abstract/more important domains, but not head-count; technical/solution architects and what-not. But the story hasn't changed -- if you assume the role of the manager is to make their resources more efficient, then a manager's value scales with the number of resources under him; an IC does not. It will always eventually make sense for a manager to be more valuable than an IC, and this only holds false at low headcounts.