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by orev 2856 days ago
Managers get paid more because their benefit to the organization is that they amplify the productivity of the entire team (if they’re good). Of course there are many examples of bad managers where this doesn’t happen, but that’s the idea anyway.
2 comments

You could say the same thing about Janitors or network engineers or devops, or many other positions in a company. If they're doing their jobs well, they increase the productivity of all other employees.

Managers might get paid more because they are a scare resource or for other reasons, but it's not just because they increase productivity.

Every job doesn’t get paid for the full value it provides to the company, otherwise the company wouldn’t be profitable, so saying that every job increases productivity is true to a point, but the scale of the increase is different. Only jobs that provide a significant increase in productivity or profits are the ones that benefit from higher salaries as a reward for that, like management and sales. Jobs like janitors, while they do provide some help in productivity, are also subject to market forces which keep the wages low.

And I didn’t say they get paid more just because of productivity increases.

On the other hand, that means bad managers are being paid more to do the opposite.