[jpfr]

As a startup founder you are automatically at the top of the company food-chain.

Managers in the middle of the food-chain are all about power-struggle and social games they play to out-compete each other.

That is especially the case for non-technical managers who don’t have a sense for the underlying technical challenges. They have all their bandwidth available for political positioning and social games.

It would be great if all managers where “serving the team” in the sense of your bullet points. But alas many don’t see it that way.

IMHO many startups are successful because they have a technical person at the top. Who is capable to understand, evaluate and positively reward technical work within their organization.

[8ytecoder]

Part of the reason for that - especially in tech - is we keep hiring people utterly unsuited to manage others. Pretty much every manager I've had is a software engineer in the past. But, only one manager was a true manager who helped me with the technical stuff, career and personal growth. The rest were all great people but totally inadequate as a manager.

In tech and pretty much every company I've worked at, you need to get into a managerial position to be able to have a say in what get built and how much you get paid. Programming fatigue and frustration with being told what to do also sets in after a while. The two together convinces people who are terrible with their people management skills to chase a manager-path career.

Essentially, you're diagnosing the symptom to be the cause.