ICs are looking at problems through a magnifying glass, colored by the nature of their specialization. Managers are supposed to be looking at the state of their team/company i more broadly, making sure that ICs are motivated to do good work, and direct their effort towards the most high-impact things, which is hard to do if you don’t have full context or an overly specialized mindset.

Once a business gets large enough then it’s impossible for any one person to fully understand everything across the entire business and to have the mindset to make the best decisions. Focusing on the wrong things can waste up to 100% of the effort the IC expends, even if that IC thinks they’re being efficient. Make effective decisions is valuable.

Good corporate management can make a company many orders of magnitude more effective. Bad corporate management can do the opposite.

A good example…

You work on a payments team for a online retailer. You want to fix the tech debt because spending 6 months would let you roll out a new payment system that would reduce manual processing by 50%.

The CEO looks at the business challenges and realizes that warehouse bottlenecks are limiting volume and sales. If you fix the payments, it fucks up inventory tracking, meaning they can’t increase volume and that’ll put next year’s growth at risk.

So your manager says “no, just keep doing the manual processing, I can hire more people if needed” and you think he’s an idiot because it’s so obvious a better payment system would “fix everything”