People don't work as much as they say

tldr; Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Office Space (1999)

Excellent distillation of the problem.

What strikes me most is that it reminds me of reading about studies of hunter-gatherer societies who pretty much spent 4 hours 'working' each day. Seems like these limits might be fairly hard-wired.

And, sure, I can do massive crunch-time sprints with the best of them, but only for limited times.

And management guidance & feedback that aligns with these realities is critical to prevent the environment from becoming toxic.

> One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen.

As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong.

Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point where even they feel like they have too much free time then one of two things has happened:

1) The company has grossly over-hired for the workload at hand. If all the tasks are done and the manager couldn't find anything to do if they tried, it's possible that the company just hired way too many people or greatly under-shot their workloads.

This really does happen at some companies that get so big and profitable that executives start chasing headcount and having the biggest department they can get away with. You end up with so many managers that most of them spend their days sitting around or, even worse, inventing new and unnecessary work for their teams just to fill time. It's not good.

2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety.

Personally, my experience was that I was far busier as a manager than I ever was as an IC. IC work is more narrowly scoped and easier to constrain to specific time limits, or get targets and deadlines shifted according to however much work could be done. As a manager, the amount of work that could be done was both never-ending and also extremely varied, comprising tens or maybe hundreds of possible tasks that often needed attention in parallel, combined with the inter-personal demands of managing people and constant hiring.

So whose fault is it that they're pay is not decent, if it's not a matter of supply and demand?

"2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety."

Big companies tend to hire "specialists" to do all those tasks you mentioned, which I think is a mistake. If the purpose of those tasks is to improve the function of product development, which can be rephrased as "make the coders more effective" then each of those people require a high bandwidth communication channel to the coders. You can only have so many people that you communicate a lot with, and so the effectiveness of those people in improving the effectiveness of product development is limited. Their job is to make sure the devs arent working in silos but they all just end up forming their own silos because its simply not practical to have high bandwidth communication with all these different groups of specialists.

Im talking about designers, product managers, project managers, user researchers, data analysts etc ...

My broader point is that I agree with your vision of what a manager should do but IME it's not how larger companies tend to be structured.