Agree. While it's great that the engineering manager understands engineering compensation and the nuances between different models, it's the HR departments that need to be educated on engineering compensation. Especially in organizations that include a high share of non-technical workers, the divide between engineering vs. non-engineering will be huge. Even standard benchmarking models compare companies based on the city & commute time instead of a whole region, country, continent.

I'm the author of the piece. Yes, that's very true.

There is a difference between what you can control and what you can influence. By understanding how it works, you increase you chance of influencing things.

The salary review is something that the average engineering manager can use to both understand this all better, and more importantly, to address mistakes or issues in their team's salaries.

It depends on the size of the company, and how deeply HR has managed to force their influence. Most companies under maybe ~1000 (give or take a few hundred) people, the managers still have some influence. Even a few large companies that are careful manage to stave off the HR influence for a little while. But yes, outside of that managers have very little actual influence.

This guide explicitly mentions it’s for “great” engineering managers, not average ones.