> there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.

That's what most bad managers I have worked tend to overestimate -- they think they are doing real work tanking the team from "bad" things when they are actually the one not communicating with the team and just cave to upper management every time when protecting your team really counts.

Most people I have worked with are aware that their average-to-good managers have to deal with things that they don't see, and when that understanding is mutual and respectful, then great work happens. When the manager always thinks that they are shielding bad things (when they are not) and the team isn't getting the communication they need, that's when bad things happen (and the manger ends up getting promoted and the rest of the team gets laid-off anyway).

> Case in point: trying to retain good people.

It's actually not that difficult: just be honest to people, treat them fairly, and be considerate.

If you spend more time arguing/reasoning why they don't deserve to be promoted/get a raise than thinking about/making planning for ways to get them promoted or fight for their salary, you're just a bad manager. Sorry (assuming they even have the awareness) is not good enough when you have screwed up someone's career progression by half a year, let alone more. It happens too often.

It baffles me that people think there is some sort of art or science in retaining good people. If good people want to try something completely and they can only do so by leaving, then let them. Otherwise, if good people want to leave it's always the company's fault (bad managers, insane colleagues who hurts culture, and many other bad things).

> Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc).

Good people usually want to leave because the company is not treating them well enough, it's as simple as that. If they leave for reasons that you can't comprehend that doesn't make them "ludicrous", you're just not good enough to understand what's really pushing them to leave.

Bad people, on the other hand, would leave for a variety of reasons, including ludicrous ones.

Assuming we are on the same page, good people are also often professional. So of course they will announce they are leaving to their direct manager, that's just the right, professional thing to do. Not sure what you point is there.

> Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention.

Successful retention in this case is very rare (unless they're they are not as good as you think they are). By the time good people want to leave, they have already made up their mind and it would take some pretty drastic changes or life-changing kind of money to keep them. It's rare that companies can make drastic changes like that when they have already screwed up for so long so that good people are pushed out. It's also rare that, by the time someone has made up their mind on leaving, that they genuinely want to stay even if the (new) price is right -- most management doesn't realize that the implication is that they have treated people unfairly for too long, and people are not just going to forget about it when you offer them more money now (what about all the time they have been underpaid?).

> However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people".

That's just bad company policy and most likely management is silencing people for some downright stupid reasons. If good people are leaving, their leaving usually already says it all, and silence actually makes other good people even more suspicious of the management.

In most cases, other employees who have good working relationship with good people actually have a better idea than management. If you're talking about people who don't know/haven't worked with those good people then... they wouldn't have cared either way.

So yes, the only reason people don't know is because it's now common practice to get people leaving to agree to NDAs -- especially when they aren't just leaving on normal terms/compensation -- even when there is absolutely no reason for them to sign any NDAs. It's not because nobody wants to tell, it's because people have been scared into not talking/literally gagged.

In the end, if you're not a narcissist, why do you want anyone you're not close to care about you leaving anyway? As long as you get well-compensated where necessary, chances are the people who really care about you already know what's happening anyway.

> The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.

"Unseen" is overrated in my opinion. In the context of moving from IC to manger, the word "unexpected" is more apt then "unseen".

Alternatively, if there is a lot of "unseen" work, then the manager is basically work that they aren't communicating to the reports AND their reports can't hold them accountable to those "unseen" work, which is clearly a sign of broken communication and cultural problem. You can argue about most managers don't actually see the work that good reports do equally well.