Managers only hear about problems which extend past our team. On the other hand, if I have to spend a whole day chasing an esoteric dependency conflict in our uber-jar, the manager won't be involved in it (and it's probably more annoying and mentally taxing than coordinating work with people on other teams).
Btw there is an interesting trend in London where individual contributors (at least in Big Data) are paid more than their managers - that's because ICs are brought in as consultants at 500+ quid a day, while companies often insist on managers being full time employees, who genrally get paid less.
You can't say something is more annoying or mentally taxing then other thing, just because you think so - and that surelly doesn't reflect on what some are paid (that's just supply and demand).
At the end of the day the problems you find on the technical side only reflect in resources spent - human resources, time, budgets... beyond some level - usually the managers level and above, that's what matters and the only thing that counts.
In a lot of organizations the technical side is literally in a bubble, doing their thing and protected from the chaos of dealing with ignorants, burocracy and shit.
Yeah, that's why I stepped down from being a PM to writing software. I personally prefered the crappy codebase, failing build envs., slow cluster, the boredom and mental exhaustion to having to deal with people in a corporate setting. I'm just not cut for that.
Btw there is an interesting trend in London where individual contributors (at least in Big Data) are paid more than their managers - that's because ICs are brought in as consultants at 500+ quid a day, while companies often insist on managers being full time employees, who genrally get paid less.