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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

People are rewarded highly at the top with the assumption they are valuable contributing intelligent leaders who can do the job better than the people getting paid poorly. They have boats and vacation homes and generational wealth, I find it VERY easy to blame them for their poor leadership. We should blame them much more often, they don't face any blame because there aren't enough people above them to enforce it. Shareholders aren't close enough to structure incentives in a way that require leaders to face any blame. You want to be rich and say it's because you earned it? Then earn it.

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I agree with the core sentiment expressed here, though I think your statements come off as absolutist. I think there are plenty of people in management (though maybe not the majority) that don't come from generational wealth. I think the boats + vacation homes + generational wealth statements you brought up are irrelevant to the main point you're making, which is that leaders should be held accountable (which I fully agree with).

Take care not to let cynicism, spite, or resentment overshadow a strong core argument.

Yes, that is true. The other thing that is true is complete lack of accountability for managers.

They can lack social skill, be rude, be incompetent, slow the project to and make it ineffective. And many still keep failing upwards.

There are good managers, it is not they don't exist. But bad ones are way more frequent then should be. People completely unsuitable for leadership keep staying managers despite destruction they cause.

I think a lot of people have a very self oriented view.

Managers have issues too, particularly good ones who care about their direct reports and getting projects done without death marches. The incentive structure is off. They are rewarded for the wrong metrics, things like number of reports (top tier metric and is a primary basis for getting titles like senior manager, director, VP, CTO, etc), which encourages growing your kingdom. Politics, credit for accomplishment when you're only a proxy for work and don't have control of all the constraints.

It's not uncommon to find yourself in the position where making the right call will be bad for your prospects for internal growth. Which means when you don't corrupt yourself, after a time you dust off your resume and try to make the next step at the next position instead of internally.

Still, you work with where you are and what you have and do your best. I want to be able to take a hand on the business side as I'm tired of projects falling apart due to bad business underpinnings I can identify from the outset. That means playing the management game from the inside so I can get to CTO where I hope to be able to make a bigger difference.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you in principle but I still have no idea how this comment relates whatsoever to the parent comment.

Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that layoffs are hitting non-management harder than management.

> Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that layoffs are hitting non-management harder than management.

It implies that layoffs are hitting non-supervisory non-managers more than line supervisors; but “management” includes non-supervisory specialist managers, and middle and upper management above the line level, all of which could be hit more than line supervisors and those they supervise. (Ideally, not enough to really make a difference in this effect – but an overload of non-line, particularly middle and specialist, management is not an uncommon organizational disease.)

You're not wrong, but to make an analogy, someone who was hired to be a great runner can't really be blamed when they're forced to swim and they're not very good at it. You lose the race either way though of course.

Of course, the more obvious answer is that they don't earn what they earn because of performance, but because of broken market incentives.

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