This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity. Systems and hierarchies therefore tend to reward good performances with what they considers as good recompense: management position.
This mindset bias is everywhere, first i noticed it in my european university, where the good teachers were promoted to high responsabilities position, meaning more and more administrative workload and far lesser time for teaching.
Leading to the vicious situation where the teacher was not teaching anymore and not happy with his position, and studend loosing a good teacher and having to face less capable teachers.
Using management position as a reward should be only used for wanabee managers.
> This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity.
Why might management be more valued by the organization? Perhaps because it produces more value for the organization?
A manager who enables 10 developers to achieve a goal (as mentioned in the post) is going to be more valuable to the organization than the same person who cranks out a bunch of code. That's the reason for the prestige and money.
Now, there are two answers to my argument. Either the organization is correct in valuing managers more highly, in which case if you want to stay an individual contributor, you should accept less pay and prestige.
Or the organization is incorrect. The costs to the organization of people being unhappy or leaving are such that the additional value from them leading a project evaporates (in the long run). In which case this should be revealed and hopefully good organizations will make adjustments. As other people have pointed out in other thread, Google does something like this.
This mindset bias is everywhere, first i noticed it in my european university, where the good teachers were promoted to high responsabilities position, meaning more and more administrative workload and far lesser time for teaching. Leading to the vicious situation where the teacher was not teaching anymore and not happy with his position, and studend loosing a good teacher and having to face less capable teachers. Using management position as a reward should be only used for wanabee managers.