[6700417]

Why should blame be tied to compensation?

Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals.

The first manager is ultimately going to be seen as more effective and will get larger bonuses and will be more frequently promoted and ultimately grow the scope of what they own. That they happen to get paid more than individuals reporting to them is entirely appropriate based on their overall impact.

That managers sometimes blame the people on their team for the failure of the team is bad management (and worse if the people above them blindly accept that) but I don’t think you can assign all blame to a manager just because they happen to be the manager and certainly not because of their relative pay.

[mehrdadn]

> Why should blame be tied to compensation? Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals.

Maybe because when those goals involve cutting corners on safety and hundreds of people die as a result, that's one heck of a lot of "impact"?

[6700417]

Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation?

Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure?

I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.

[mehrdadn]

> Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation? Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure? I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.

To entertain the naive pedantry for a second: first, I think a heck of a lot of people would tolerate that 50% scenario more than the status quo, and second, it's not exactly outrageous to suggest the impact you have on a design goes hand-in-hand with how much blame you deserve for it when it breaks (or how much praise you deserve for it when it works). Now, you yourself say compensation should also be tied to impact. Apply the transitive property. You might be surprised what you get.

But surely you realize you're making a strawman out of the points people are trying to make? It's not literally the "same thing", it's an approximation meant to get a point across, and it's based on the assumption that you apply some common sense instead of treating it like a mathematical proposition. Like the understanding that you literally can't fire 98.3% of one guy and 1.7% of another, so clearly everyone understands "blame" will get out of sync with compensation; that in itself is obviously not the literal point. And the understanding what people are clearly upset about is the fact that those who are given more responsibility and power over a product (which just so happens to go hand-in-hand with their pay) frequently appear to bear far less blame than those whom they manage and give directions to. Nitpicking on why it should be proportional to the guy's salary is literally missing the gigantic problem the other person is trying to point out.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Apparently "risk" is tied to compensation. And so is talent.

So if you have someone telling you they're more talented than you are, and they take bigger risks, and that's why they're paid a lot more than you, why would you not expect them to take more responsibility than everyone else when things go wrong?