alt Hacker News> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)
How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them.
It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.
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You can also get companies sinking because people spend too much time on their pet projects which aren't ultimately of much value. I've generally found things sit somewhere in the middle and the feeling of 'X are idiots' for any given layer X of the organisation correlates more with the quality of communication than most other things.
I had a conversation with an engineering manager a few years ago. He told me his daily job was to visit each engineer report, and ask them what they were working on. Then he'd gently guide them back to what they were supposed to be working on.
A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer.
The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers.
BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.