The same way anything is normalized. One person/company does something, posts the outcomes of it, then other people follow. I don't think many companies have tested this logic out, as management style in tech is inherited from older corps.

I think this could have great benefits. If a manager's job salary is directly capped to the average of their ICs, then it's their benefit to make the best engineers and show that these engineers deserve an increase in salary - ergo the manager's salary is increased. At the same time, no one will be rushing to management just to get a salary bump.

I still don't see how you beat the market-driven salary. Don't you have to pay market rate for good managers, and market rate for good IC's?

If a company unilaterally cuts manager pay, they presumably won't get great managers, or at least not good managers who also want to be paid fairly.

It also means managers will only want to manage more senior IC's, so as to benefit from the higher salary, while it's the junior IC's who need more capable management.

You could drop manager pay and accept that it will mean "worse" managers, and perhaps hope to make up the difference by using the savings to pay more for ICs and hope that this will get you "better" ICs and the result will be better team performance overall.

I don't know how you'd ever make that change to a company structure though. The turkeys would have to vote for christmas.

> if companies find that they are more profitable paying managers more.

Is there any reason to believe this? Other than just assuming that whatever companies do is optimal for their profits?

I mean there are, what, millions of independently run companies in the world.

I suppose it’s possible there!s some totally novel idea nobody has tried but which would be hugely successful and revolutionize corporate practices. But I’m very skeptical there is an objectively more successful model just waiting for some company to stumble on it.

That's not "companies find they are more profitable". That's "nobody does it and it's probably because some tried and decided it was better not to, and maybe the way they decided it was better was by comparing profits".

It's fascinating as it seems like most modern problems are the result of wrong arguments being just more convincing. Like, they're. A virus well designed to exploit the most number of human logical fallacies and heuristics.

Not sure if you're intentionally demonstrating by example, but you definitely nailed it. People are suckers for "there's this one simple explanation that explains hugely complex problems."