If this sort of thing were easy to resolve, it would have been done by now. There are lots of overlapping issues. First of all, there's the question of who really has responsibility for what the engineering team does? Secondly, why should a competent manager with a relatively easy education in his past earn more than engineers who "busted their humps" for years getting the necessary credentials to perform the tasks he manages? The respect issues is paramount to many engineers, and that's a justification for promoting from the engineering staff into management, which, in turn, suggests why so many companies with fine engineering staff are so clumsily managed.

Management and engineering are very different disciplines, and, frankly, in many companies, management lacks discipline of any sort. Some managers think all they have to do is to stand there and point.

I've said many times, that engineering team managers are there to keep the company's "features" from interfering with engineering. That actually happens all too seldom.

RE