Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, with the managerial one viewed as above the programmers’ one.
What does “above” mean? Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time; that’s just part of managing people. For humans, this seems to be inescapably tied to higher social status.
Is there a separate sense of “above” you refer to? Higher paychecks for managers are common. But then I might as well ask the more general question of why different job-tracks have different paychecks at similar levels of experience, seniority, and skill percentile. There are various reasons; one is that the top-level executives deciding on paycheck policy are usually promoted from the top ranks of the management track, rather than a technical one.
Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time
In principle, that two-hierarchy system, #3 above could allow for true parallelism: The most senior people on the technical ladder would have a boss, like anyone else, but this boss would be someone who is way up the management ladder. Also, in this hypothetical system, the top non-manager technical people would have similar compensation to top managers.
In practice, the most senior people on the ladder simply merge into the management ladder, so that at that point there is no non-management technical ladder.
What does “above” mean? Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time; that’s just part of managing people. For humans, this seems to be inescapably tied to higher social status.
Is there a separate sense of “above” you refer to? Higher paychecks for managers are common. But then I might as well ask the more general question of why different job-tracks have different paychecks at similar levels of experience, seniority, and skill percentile. There are various reasons; one is that the top-level executives deciding on paycheck policy are usually promoted from the top ranks of the management track, rather than a technical one.
In principle, that two-hierarchy system, #3 above could allow for true parallelism: The most senior people on the technical ladder would have a boss, like anyone else, but this boss would be someone who is way up the management ladder. Also, in this hypothetical system, the top non-manager technical people would have similar compensation to top managers.
In practice, the most senior people on the ladder simply merge into the management ladder, so that at that point there is no non-management technical ladder.
So, #2 above is far more common.