In my (big tech) company, managers have little leverage to retain people. Salary/bonus aren't in their control. Even evaluation aren't decided by them.
They can try to make people happy so they stay in the team, but I find that they aren't very good at that either. When the team has issues, I don't find them effective to solve any problem.
They do administrative work, communicate with leadership, hire, 1:1 which are more or less useful, help with roadmapping and alignement, attend calibration meetings for evaluation.
I'm not saying they're not useful or that they don't work, but I find they leave the hard parts to the team to figure out. The hard part would be things like pushing backs on leadership demands, helping prioritizing tasks in the team.
Concrete example: right now, everybody is overworked in my team, oncall is hard because we're pushed to ship new features, not work on reliability. Manager pretends to be empathetic, "always happy to help". But practically does nothing.
My criteria for a good manager is that they're not harmful and don't add friction and stress (and those ones aren't appreciated by higher management). More than that, I've never seen it. But maybe i wasn't lucky.
They can try to make people happy so they stay in the team, but I find that they aren't very good at that either. When the team has issues, I don't find them effective to solve any problem.
They do administrative work, communicate with leadership, hire, 1:1 which are more or less useful, help with roadmapping and alignement, attend calibration meetings for evaluation.
I'm not saying they're not useful or that they don't work, but I find they leave the hard parts to the team to figure out. The hard part would be things like pushing backs on leadership demands, helping prioritizing tasks in the team.
Concrete example: right now, everybody is overworked in my team, oncall is hard because we're pushed to ship new features, not work on reliability. Manager pretends to be empathetic, "always happy to help". But practically does nothing.
My criteria for a good manager is that they're not harmful and don't add friction and stress (and those ones aren't appreciated by higher management). More than that, I've never seen it. But maybe i wasn't lucky.