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>Which is where I fundamentally disagree with you. Optimised database indexes (for example) can be valuable to a company. But if the company lacked a developer who could optimise them, they could get by - they'd just have to get more/faster servers.

Look up complexity theory. There are plenty of cases where hardware will not make up for a poorly written sql query. If the people giving direction don't understand the technology, they will make stupid decisions like thinking that they can fix a bad query by throwing hardware at it.

>You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same way. In fact, doing so usually makes it worse. If you don't have managers that know the company, can interact with other stakeholders and otherwise just manage people, you're screwed.

This statement has done nothing to convince me that managers have skill that is so hard to find as to justify their high wages.

You certainly need managers, but I think it best if you pick a suitable engineer for this role precisely to avoid the database example you just provided. An engineering manager should get a higher pay than their peers, because they are not only experts in the domain but also have some people skills.

But a non-expert manager? Their only skill is communicating and giving orders? This is role that should ideally go away.