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I've seen claims from organizations that have "equal but separate management/director & eng tracks." Usually, one starts out as an engineer, and then after gett

I've seen claims from organizations that have "equal but separate management/director & eng tracks." Usually, one starts out as an engineer, and then after getting a few promotions, becomes eligible to switch to the management track. I wonder if you could do a similar thing with middle-managers and directors: you don't become eligible for a director position until you've been promoted to a certain level on the eng or management tracks, but if you so desired, you could climb the same pay scale as a director, even if you choose to stay a manager, just like the very top engineers supposedly have the same pay scale as directors.

kabouseng 13y ago
Thing is, and most engineers don't like to hear this, to climb in payscale, you have to take on more responsibility and risks. And just staying a pure engineer (no management / leading people / deciding company strategy / client and contractual responsibility), you don't take on much risk or responsibility.
- lsc 13y ago
  You are, of course, right. The reason why this seems so counter-intuitive for Engineers is that Management obviously doesn't take any more personal risk than an individual contributor does. If they screw it up badly enough? they get fired, just like we do. The risk and responsibility that management takes? it is not personal risk. It is risking other people's money. It's a responsibility to those other people. In a real way, management is acting as the agent of the investor who actually owns the place. It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate. (or in a more ideologically pure world, the investor thinks that her interests are served by paying her agent well.) It's sort of how sysadmins payscales are often not based on the difficulty of the task, but instead are based on how expensive the thing they are supporting is.
  - kabouseng 13y ago
    >>The risk and responsibility that management takes? it is not personal risk I am not so sure. Usually it isn't the entire team that gets fired, it's the project manager. The company still acknowledges the knowledge and value locked up in the engineer, and if he did his job, but the project manager / whomever made the wrong choices, the engineer is pretty safe. Unless of course the entire company goes down, but when you have management tiers, the company is large so usually some project managers gets fired first before everybody else. >>It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate. That is absolutely true, and is why the CFO is usually one of the best paid employees in a company, even though his value to the company might be lower than other key employees.
    - lsc 13y ago
      >I am not so sure. Usually it isn't the entire team that gets fired, it's the project manager. The company still acknowledges the knowledge and value locked up in the engineer, and if he did his job, but the project manager / whomever made the wrong choices, the engineer is pretty safe. If the project fails, well, seeing to it that the project doesn't fail is the manager's job, so yeah, if the project fails, the manager is more likely to get fired than an Engineer, especially if other managers think that the project failed due to poor management. However, if the engineer fails, it is the manager's job to fire the Engineer in question, before the Engineer's failure turns into a project failure. So either way, yeah, if you are perceived to have failed at your job, you are likely to get fired. The manager has a different job than the engineer, and thus is likely to get fired in different situations. But I don't think that managers have less job security than Engineers. In fact, I think Managers face rather less systemic risk in terms of technology changes than Engineers do. For instance, when UNIX beat mainframes? There were a lot of SysAdmins who had to scramble for serious retraining or to make the jump to management.

kabouseng 13y ago

Thing is, and most engineers don't like to hear this, to climb in payscale, you have to take on more responsibility and risks. And just staying a pure engineer (no management / leading people / deciding company strategy / client and contractual responsibility), you don't take on much risk or responsibility.

lsc 13y ago
You are, of course, right. The reason why this seems so counter-intuitive for Engineers is that Management obviously doesn't take any more personal risk than an individual contributor does. If they screw it up badly enough? they get fired, just like we do. The risk and responsibility that management takes? it is not personal risk. It is risking other people's money. It's a responsibility to those other people. In a real way, management is acting as the agent of the investor who actually owns the place. It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate. (or in a more ideologically pure world, the investor thinks that her interests are served by paying her agent well.) It's sort of how sysadmins payscales are often not based on the difficulty of the task, but instead are based on how expensive the thing they are supporting is.
- kabouseng 13y ago
  >>The risk and responsibility that management takes? it is not personal risk I am not so sure. Usually it isn't the entire team that gets fired, it's the project manager. The company still acknowledges the knowledge and value locked up in the engineer, and if he did his job, but the project manager / whomever made the wrong choices, the engineer is pretty safe. Unless of course the entire company goes down, but when you have management tiers, the company is large so usually some project managers gets fired first before everybody else. >>It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate. That is absolutely true, and is why the CFO is usually one of the best paid employees in a company, even though his value to the company might be lower than other key employees.
  - lsc 13y ago
    >I am not so sure. Usually it isn't the entire team that gets fired, it's the project manager. The company still acknowledges the knowledge and value locked up in the engineer, and if he did his job, but the project manager / whomever made the wrong choices, the engineer is pretty safe. If the project fails, well, seeing to it that the project doesn't fail is the manager's job, so yeah, if the project fails, the manager is more likely to get fired than an Engineer, especially if other managers think that the project failed due to poor management. However, if the engineer fails, it is the manager's job to fire the Engineer in question, before the Engineer's failure turns into a project failure. So either way, yeah, if you are perceived to have failed at your job, you are likely to get fired. The manager has a different job than the engineer, and thus is likely to get fired in different situations. But I don't think that managers have less job security than Engineers. In fact, I think Managers face rather less systemic risk in terms of technology changes than Engineers do. For instance, when UNIX beat mainframes? There were a lot of SysAdmins who had to scramble for serious retraining or to make the jump to management.