As Elon Musk put it, ~"Managers receive the greatest distillation of all the problems. They have the worst job"
They are the ones expected to solve the hardest problems. If someone can't figure it out, it gets pushed up the chain.
That's gross oversimplification. In some models, some managers are pure resource managers as you're describing. A lot of us are functional managers, though. I own the outcome.
It's become really common in engineering, particularly in orgs doing agile, to split resource and functional management. I don't care for that. I spent a long time as a product owner and wondered quite often why I couldn't just absorb the resource manager's responsibilities as well, since the only thing I wasn't doing was writing reviews. Every other problem rolled up to me, since I was accountable for the outcome.
That's an absurd generalisation, and you should probably stop thinking Dilbert is a useful guide to most workplaces.
Some companies work that way, but they are bad companies to work for, IME.
Other companies, managers have got where they are because they know more than anybody else and have the personal skills to marshal a team into solving bigger problems than what is on the board for this sprint alone.
Source: ex-CTO, now Senior Engineer again, done every level of management you can think of, choose to be where I am for a reason, but do not think managers are idiots.
A manager that is doing the job right, is managing. Resources, people, time. Not doing Engineering.
Call yourself an idiot if you like (I don't think I said that anywhere?) Managing is a difficult task that requires knowledge and skills. But not Engineering ones.
There's another name for when a Manager is telling his Engineers how to solve problems: micro-managing
Managers only hear about problems which extend past our team. On the other hand, if I have to spend a whole day chasing an esoteric dependency conflict in our uber-jar, the manager won't be involved in it (and it's probably more annoying and mentally taxing than coordinating work with people on other teams).
Btw there is an interesting trend in London where individual contributors (at least in Big Data) are paid more than their managers - that's because ICs are brought in as consultants at 500+ quid a day, while companies often insist on managers being full time employees, who genrally get paid less.
You can't say something is more annoying or mentally taxing then other thing, just because you think so - and that surelly doesn't reflect on what some are paid (that's just supply and demand).
At the end of the day the problems you find on the technical side only reflect in resources spent - human resources, time, budgets... beyond some level - usually the managers level and above, that's what matters and the only thing that counts.
In a lot of organizations the technical side is literally in a bubble, doing their thing and protected from the chaos of dealing with ignorants, burocracy and shit.
Yeah, that's why I stepped down from being a PM to writing software. I personally prefered the crappy codebase, failing build envs., slow cluster, the boredom and mental exhaustion to having to deal with people in a corporate setting. I'm just not cut for that.
