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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
1) You are wrong about them being incompetent
2) The person promoting them is also incompetent and has mistakenly promoted the wrong person.
I have literally never seen or heard of anyone promoting someone to limit the harm they can do. It's something bitter people tell themselves to help them feel better about being passed over. It's not the explanation you are looking for.
Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition. It’s not incompetent to do things that you wouldn’t do, or to do things that upset you, or to do things that don’t put your desires first.
I've seen a few senior developers who weren't great programmers, but could communicate effectively, manage up and down, etc. So long as they were willing to defer to others on harder technical topics, they usually made pretty good team leads when/if promoted.
The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.
It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.
The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.
That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.
I resigned the next day and since the company had a mandatory gardening leave period by boss couldn’t override, that project went back off the tracks.
Making that decision was stupid but I can understand why they’d arrive at it, telling me was the true fuck up, they could have just said we decided to go with someone else and I’d have brushed it off, I didn’t mind what I was doing in the role I was in.
Whatever people skills really are that guy did not have them.
So; instead of having a competent VP leading a team of absolute incompetents and changing the direction and capabilities of that entire org, we lost a capable leader to another company.
Leadership politics and maneuvering is fucking stupid.
I understand the thinking but if you tell someone that, you have to offer something in lieu of upward mobility. Money, perks, status, something.
You definitely don’t tell them (as happened here) how critical they are to your business and at the same time tell them you want to cut their bonuses.
For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.
A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.
I suspect there is a lot of bias in action, for example extraverts genuinely believing that other extraverts are competent even if they are not.
Perhaps the most common is to “promote” a CEO to vice chairman of the board.
Someone in management who has failed to meet goals will often have a position created for them with no reports. This is normally an advisory role to not impact them negatively for future roles and to give them runway to leave.
I’ve seen it twice and only in higher level roles.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Multiple times teams would end up losing their manager and the promotion felt to the one that losing as a contributor would hurt less.
I've seen it happen outside IT too, e.g. in banking where a higher position also implied legal responsibility so it came with perils. But again middle managers, bank directors, stuff like that.
I have seen less capable engineers who were more interested in management being promoted. Some engineers may interpret this as promoting incompetence, because many engineers only value engineering competence. Which is also why they don't get put in management positions.
This just isnt the case and suggests you have not been at a senior enough position to understand the dynamics of promotion into middle management from a the top-down pov.
It is not uncommon for an incompetent person to be promoted in order to be a fall guy, to be setup to fail and take the blame -- to play one department against another, and so on. Promoting incompetent people can also surface their incompetence to others in ways that could be politically useful. This happens all the time.
What I HAVE seen is engineers who don’t understand the skills required for management thinking that this is what happened.
Look at the provenance of this “principle” and its author make it pretty clear that’s really going on here.
Also, this is not a promotion, it's a role change.
Edit: btw, the premise is completely wrong. Managers can cause far more damage to teams than an IC on the team can cause.
Bad managers hollow out companies. It's quite devastating.
I have seen something similar, though: a valued employee doesn't have balanced functional skills at their current position, and yet is a net positive due to other factors. They are good at problem solving but bad at coding; they are great at oncall operations but bad at design; they are good at making others better but not great by themselves.
They can either acquire the skills to be functionally competent alongside their peers, or management can give them responsibilities that allow them to contribute without actually having them be good at their current job.
That's definitely flunking upward but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
At my old job, my temporary manager was the Jenkins CICD guy who knew nothing that wasn't posted at StackOverflow.
To give OP credit, the manager that was hired, knew nothing about nothing. He would take his dog for a walk during a system crash :)
The new CTO was also incompetent, he spent more time with the business team than knowing how to write a simple script.
One incompetent hired another incompetent.
The company's warehouse firewall was exposed to the internet, their response?? pfSense is safe enough :)
What (to me) is more common - unfireable incompetence is left to fester by avoidant management and then flushed by 24-36 month restructure cycles.
2. There is no evidence to support this at all, it is something a comic book author made up
...
And managers that hired those people don't want to admit that they are bad at hiring people.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is very relevant here. Competent companies do not have this problem. Incompetent companies are completely oblivious to this problem.
I haven't seen companies actually promote incompetents into management. Usually they're just given their walking papers. The more charismatic or well-connected ones are given some sort of lateral career track, like from actual engineering into sales engineering or something. I have never been charismatic nor well-connected enough to pull this off.
For what it's worth I also think the Peter Principle aphorisms are wrong. These basically revolve around the assertion that many managers are incompetent because they got promoted based on competence at a lower role, and therefore if they have been at the same level for a while it implies they are not good enough to advance. Well, it's true that management is a different job function than the actual domain functions, but people can and do learn. It's also not mathematically possible to move up indefinitely, because there just aren't enough management roles for that. Unfortunately, some people take jokes too seriously, as I'm sure was done with this post.
I have never seen this actually happen. I have seen lots of people THINK that someone incompetent got the job over them. The issue is that most of the people who felt they deserved the job were definitely suffering from Dunning–Kruger.