If you see someone incompetent being promoted then it's more likely:
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.
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.
Perhaps they weren't incompetent in their prior role, but some people have difficulty transitioning from a technical role into a managerial role, so they become incompetent at their new role.
I've seen it in action a few times specifically in government.
It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.
Finance won't give them more headcount.
So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.
I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.
Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.
It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.
Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.
This reflects my own experience too. Generally speaking, incompetent people don't get promoted in the same way you normally understand promotion. They don't get their boss's job. They don't stay in their boss's boss's reporting line.
They move to a nominally higher level role in a different department, often a cost centre, generally to some role which serves the organisation just by existing (e.g. a legally required role, or something that serves some certification purpose, or so that sales teams can say 'we have a dedicated person in our X office for doing that').
I can relate to all of these. One way to get rid of them is to put them on a "special project". Something low stakes and inconsequential to keep them busy.
There's a subtlety to (1), in that people can be incompetent at things that don't matter, but competent at things that do, and people often latch on to the wrong incompetence.
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.
Yeah, and i’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s the first one much more often than anyone here would like to admit.
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 person the company owner promoted ahead of me had me fired. I was principal designer for the company's main solutions.
He couldn't design or write software solutions. He then stole source code I wrote along with product designs I created and went to the competition. Was taken to court and settled. Competitor never hired him. Schadenfreude!
Never underestimate ass kissers and yes-men. It works wonders on narcissistic people.
I got out right told the reason I wasn’t getting promoted was because I was too valuable where I was which was getting a critical project back on track.
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.
Literally heard that someone wasn’t promoted to a VP role because they were too good at their job as a Director and promoting them would lose their competency.
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.
As a former manager once told me, "if you aren't replaceable, you aren't promotable either." It makes sense for the company even if it sucks personally, but it's something you can also address yourself.
Yep, I’ve seen that, too. I’ve also seen people give up a promotion after they decided that managing a team wasn’t what they were good at. A wise person understands themself and knows not to chase the brass ring if that’s not actually what makes them tick.
Yeah, I think this is the most defensible steelman of the concept: Incompetent people aren't deliberately sought out for promotions, but there is a disincentive to promote some of the most competent people. Sometimes. For some very context-dependent notions of "(in)competent."
Yeah, but do they do this on purpose (e.g. to avoid promoting someone who might outshine them), or they just do the random thing because they are incompetent?
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.
It just happened at my company. He produced problems in his team (at least from what I have heard) and now produces problems/friction for whatever team must interface with him and depend on him.
I don't think anybody thought he's competent. The role didn't exist before, though (Chief of Test or something) and doesn't have real leverage. So he's in the meetings saying stuff but my feeling is that people mostly work around him and he generally doesn't know the answer to questions that fall within the scope of his role.
I feel bad for him to be honest, would be a very tough spot/role to be in anyway and he seems not be able to enable himself being actually productive.
This does occur but not in a way that often creates this situation.
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.
I heard about a very incompetent engineer at the start of my career.
Always asking dumb questions. Asking other people to create "sample projects" for her.
She is now a principal PM manager where I work now. She has no idea I know her from our prior company 20 years ago, but surely it is the same person. You do not get to that level without what it takes.
I think there's a third explanation: the person being promoted may indeed be incompetent at the job they have been doing, but be good at the skills required of a manager. I've seen that one happen. Management has very little in common (in terms of skills needed) with doing the work, so just because someone is bad at their current position doesn't mean they'll be a bad manager.
I'm so happy to see this reply chain at the top of this thread. I really wish we could stamp out the snobbery of software engineers thinking they understand everything about everything because they understand Rust. As the current topical example, AI companies saying they can replace XYZ professions with LLMs. Doctor's for instance, don't just do diagnosis and data processing. A huge part of the job is sympathy and understanding. Although I'm sure someone will say that AI can fake that too.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Or vise versa. That ass kisser with no work life balance might be a fine IC but you make him a manager and he'll act like a slave driver and burn the whole team out acting like that.
Another option that I've seen repeatedly is people with excellent technical competence being put in positions of management or leadership, where they are incompetent with the requisite skills for those roles.
I’ve never found this to actually be the case (that somebody promoted someone they thought was incompetent to “limit damage”). Yes, incompetent employees get promoted sometimes, but it’s typically because they have been brown-nosing an executive and the executive thinks they are actually talented.
Oh I've seen it many times especially in IT land, but almost always to middle management positions, almost never c-suite.
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 never once seen this happen. Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people.
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.
> Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people
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.
I’ve been a VP at F500 companies and never seen it done deliberately. There are plenty of ways to manage poor performers out of an organizations. Promotion isn’t one of them.
Wow, move the goalposts much? Okay, I’ll stipulate that somebody, somewhere, at some time might have been promoted to get them out of the way. But I’ll tell you it’s definitely not the norm in any company that I’ve ever worked in, to the point that I’ve literally never seen it after nearly 40 years and having worked at all levels from 1st level manager to VP, from F500 to 2-person companies.
I didn't move the goal posts, what I'm saying is that you must have worked for good companies. I'm not saying you're intrinsically wrong, but maybe you just haven't experienced this.
Your anec-data is no more valid or invalid than mine. You probably have had a "better" and more successful career than I've had is all I'm saying and that probably colors your experience in a way where you see something like this and you think, "no way! no company would ever do this! How stupid of a company!" That's good - that's "correct," it is stupid.
Well, I'm here saying, "meh, I've seen variations on this for sure, maybe not exactly, but yeah... it's a thing people (IMO stupidly) do."
Some companies are pretty dumb. Speaking of "dumb" companies, I once worked for a company (now out of business) that had a little switch under the dashboard I found that turned off the mandatory maintenance tracking for their airplanes. Every time the owner would cover shifts, he'd forget to turn that switch back on and the airplane would stop logging time. Weird how the previous day it had mysteriously flown all day and only logged an hour or so... Needless to say I left shortly after I found this out. Colossally stupid that move on their part - but it happened. When I tell my airline buddies about this experience they look at me like I'm a martian. "Like a switch? No way, you're exaggerating. Didn't the mechanics fix it?" Guys... the mechanics were just as complicit in the issue, some organizations just do dumb stuff. Some workplace cultures breed stupid behavior. Sometimes people are dumb. In the long run these companies burn out and fail typically though...
I have had a terrible manager - he was a so-so developer that got the job because his old manager wanted to be rid of him and gave him a glowing recommendation.
I've never seen this happen as a reaction to actual incompetence, where the person is a net negative and a drag on everyone.
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.
While this may be a funny take, the real one I tend to see happening in the real world sometimes (and is mentioned by contrast in the post) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Incompetent nurses in the VA system get promoted to management so they do not harm any patients. I have seen it happen over and over again. They spend their time in meetings all day instead of in direct patient care.
I'd be surprised if they called out Dave Mitchinson the incompetent lead project manager at GeneralMassiveTech Industries United LLC, but they probably should have just omitted the "Examples" heading entirely if they weren't going to name and shame.
I've seen the opposite happen (most competent person applying for promotion passed over because they are too hard to replace in their current role), but not incompetent people being managed up.
What (to me) is more common - unfireable incompetence is left to fester by avoidant management and then flushed by 24-36 month restructure cycles.
This is presented as a fact, but lacks documented real-world instances, direct measurements, or even any proxy measures that suggest it's actually happening.
A department chair at a university is usually not the most productive researcher, as far as I can tell. And if they are, they tend to leave the position quickly to refocus on research. As far as I've seen it is not unusual for people who are engaged with what they do to avoid admin tasks. A dynamic like that would seem to push less engaged or capable people into admin.
This was a deliberate and well-known policy in a large company that I worked - to promote incompetent ones to R&D department. This is used when firing them from job is too messy due to unionism etc. They are simply moved to R&D where whatever they do doesn't affect company's business.
I don’t understand the message the page design is supposed to send. Hierarchical areas and buttons just look ridiculous. If it’s AI design, good for you not wasting time doing something you don’t care about, but you could have equally communicated you didn’t care by making your essay plain text.
A coworker at one of my former employers put it thus: People who can do engineering become engineers. People who get into engineering but can't do it become Six Sigma consultants.
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.
I think it's just that people who can't individually contribute end up doing... whatever else.
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.
Let's replace management with AI already. The investors can then remain the real management. To the extent a manager's work is not managerial, they shouldn't be called management.
I have never seen or heard of this happening. I have had managers who would not be able to do the grunt work, but they certainly weren't hired because they couldn't do that work.
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.
Save yourself 5 minutes and just read the Wikipedia article on "The Dilbert Principal" it's more useful, has more content and doesn't have this atrocious layout.
> companies often promote struggling employees into management roles where their impact is perceived as less immediately harmful
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.
If you see someone incompetent being promoted then it's more likely:
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.
> 1) You are wrong about them being incompetent
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.
Perhaps they weren't incompetent in their prior role, but some people have difficulty transitioning from a technical role into a managerial role, so they become incompetent at their new role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
I included Peter Principle in my comment above because it's one of the rhetorical tools these people invoke to comfort themselves.
I've seen it in action a few times specifically in government.
It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.
Finance won't give them more headcount.
So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.
I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.
Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.
It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.
Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.
This reflects my own experience too. Generally speaking, incompetent people don't get promoted in the same way you normally understand promotion. They don't get their boss's job. They don't stay in their boss's boss's reporting line.
They move to a nominally higher level role in a different department, often a cost centre, generally to some role which serves the organisation just by existing (e.g. a legally required role, or something that serves some certification purpose, or so that sales teams can say 'we have a dedicated person in our X office for doing that').
I can relate to all of these. One way to get rid of them is to put them on a "special project". Something low stakes and inconsequential to keep them busy.
That's also made to get rid of people. Can't fire them, but you can bore them out or generally disliking their work so they quit.
Better of course to engage with such people enabling them being productive. Or just buy them out of the contract.
There's a subtlety to (1), in that people can be incompetent at things that don't matter, but competent at things that do, and people often latch on to the wrong incompetence.
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.
Yeah, and i’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s the first one much more often than anyone here would like to admit.
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.
Also, promotions can be a different job.
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 person the company owner promoted ahead of me had me fired. I was principal designer for the company's main solutions.
He couldn't design or write software solutions. He then stole source code I wrote along with product designs I created and went to the competition. Was taken to court and settled. Competitor never hired him. Schadenfreude!
Never underestimate ass kissers and yes-men. It works wonders on narcissistic people.
I have seen people not get promoted because they’re too competent, too good at their job. They’re too valuable to lose in their position.
I got out right told the reason I wasn’t getting promoted was because I was too valuable where I was which was getting a critical project back on track.
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.
Or your boss found the decision equally stupid and unfair so he told you?
Literally heard that someone wasn’t promoted to a VP role because they were too good at their job as a Director and promoting them would lose their competency.
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.
As a former manager once told me, "if you aren't replaceable, you aren't promotable either." It makes sense for the company even if it sucks personally, but it's something you can also address yourself.
Yep, I’ve seen that, too. I’ve also seen people give up a promotion after they decided that managing a team wasn’t what they were good at. A wise person understands themself and knows not to chase the brass ring if that’s not actually what makes them tick.
Yeah, I think this is the most defensible steelman of the concept: Incompetent people aren't deliberately sought out for promotions, but there is a disincentive to promote some of the most competent people. Sometimes. For some very context-dependent notions of "(in)competent."
I’ve been that person. I was told to my face that I was being passed over for promotion because I was “a doer” and “got things done”.
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.
The fact that they don’t want somebody who “got things done” in management would be an immediate red flag and sign to leave for me.
3) You’re incorrect about the metrics being used to evaluate who to promote and they are not incompetent according to those metrics.
Incompetent people promoting incompetent people is called a kakocracy and is prevalent in large companies.
Yeah, but do they do this on purpose (e.g. to avoid promoting someone who might outshine them), or they just do the random thing because they are incompetent?
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.
I think they do the random thing.
[dead]
It just happened at my company. He produced problems in his team (at least from what I have heard) and now produces problems/friction for whatever team must interface with him and depend on him. I don't think anybody thought he's competent. The role didn't exist before, though (Chief of Test or something) and doesn't have real leverage. So he's in the meetings saying stuff but my feeling is that people mostly work around him and he generally doesn't know the answer to questions that fall within the scope of his role.
I feel bad for him to be honest, would be a very tough spot/role to be in anyway and he seems not be able to enable himself being actually productive.
Yeah, this is so off-base. Or, OP has only ever worked at terribly bad companies.
This does occur but not in a way that often creates this situation.
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.
It happens and I’ve seen it many times. But it’s only worthwhile at the C-suite level or equivalent.
Perhaps the most common is to “promote” a CEO to vice chairman of the board.
I heard about a very incompetent engineer at the start of my career.
Always asking dumb questions. Asking other people to create "sample projects" for her.
She is now a principal PM manager where I work now. She has no idea I know her from our prior company 20 years ago, but surely it is the same person. You do not get to that level without what it takes.
I think there's a third explanation: the person being promoted may indeed be incompetent at the job they have been doing, but be good at the skills required of a manager. I've seen that one happen. Management has very little in common (in terms of skills needed) with doing the work, so just because someone is bad at their current position doesn't mean they'll be a bad manager.
I'm so happy to see this reply chain at the top of this thread. I really wish we could stamp out the snobbery of software engineers thinking they understand everything about everything because they understand Rust. As the current topical example, AI companies saying they can replace XYZ professions with LLMs. Doctor's for instance, don't just do diagnosis and data processing. A huge part of the job is sympathy and understanding. Although I'm sure someone will say that AI can fake that too.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Or vise versa. That ass kisser with no work life balance might be a fine IC but you make him a manager and he'll act like a slave driver and burn the whole team out acting like that.
3) the person who promoted them likes them.
Another option that I've seen repeatedly is people with excellent technical competence being put in positions of management or leadership, where they are incompetent with the requisite skills for those roles.
I’ve never found this to actually be the case (that somebody promoted someone they thought was incompetent to “limit damage”). Yes, incompetent employees get promoted sometimes, but it’s typically because they have been brown-nosing an executive and the executive thinks they are actually talented.
Oh I've seen it many times especially in IT land, but almost always to middle management positions, almost never c-suite.
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 never once seen this happen. Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people.
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.
> Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people
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.
Certainly true I have not been at that level or witnessed that kind of political play.
I’ve been a VP at F500 companies and never seen it done deliberately. There are plenty of ways to manage poor performers out of an organizations. Promotion isn’t one of them.
Arguably though, this is why it was a F500 company and not a poorly managed consulting firm headquartered in Des Moines or whatever.
I’ve definitely seen something approaching this before, in different industries even.
Wow, move the goalposts much? Okay, I’ll stipulate that somebody, somewhere, at some time might have been promoted to get them out of the way. But I’ll tell you it’s definitely not the norm in any company that I’ve ever worked in, to the point that I’ve literally never seen it after nearly 40 years and having worked at all levels from 1st level manager to VP, from F500 to 2-person companies.
I didn't move the goal posts, what I'm saying is that you must have worked for good companies. I'm not saying you're intrinsically wrong, but maybe you just haven't experienced this.
Your anec-data is no more valid or invalid than mine. You probably have had a "better" and more successful career than I've had is all I'm saying and that probably colors your experience in a way where you see something like this and you think, "no way! no company would ever do this! How stupid of a company!" That's good - that's "correct," it is stupid.
Well, I'm here saying, "meh, I've seen variations on this for sure, maybe not exactly, but yeah... it's a thing people (IMO stupidly) do."
Some companies are pretty dumb. Speaking of "dumb" companies, I once worked for a company (now out of business) that had a little switch under the dashboard I found that turned off the mandatory maintenance tracking for their airplanes. Every time the owner would cover shifts, he'd forget to turn that switch back on and the airplane would stop logging time. Weird how the previous day it had mysteriously flown all day and only logged an hour or so... Needless to say I left shortly after I found this out. Colossally stupid that move on their part - but it happened. When I tell my airline buddies about this experience they look at me like I'm a martian. "Like a switch? No way, you're exaggerating. Didn't the mechanics fix it?" Guys... the mechanics were just as complicit in the issue, some organizations just do dumb stuff. Some workplace cultures breed stupid behavior. Sometimes people are dumb. In the long run these companies burn out and fail typically though...
I have had a terrible manager - he was a so-so developer that got the job because his old manager wanted to be rid of him and gave him a glowing recommendation.
Okay, but the hiring manager didn’t hire him because he was a poor performers, right?
Yep, agreed. I have seen that, where engineers decide they really want to be something else and it actually works for them.
I've supported moving people from IC to manager easily 50+ times in my career and never once has it been to limit the damage someone can do.
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.
> Managers can cause far more damage to teams than an IC on the team can cause.
Yep, and a bad manager tends to last a lot longer than a bad individual contributor.
The edit is dead on and this is the very first thing that crossed my mind.
Bad managers hollow out companies. It's quite devastating.
I've never seen this happen as a reaction to actual incompetence, where the person is a net negative and a drag on everyone.
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.
I’ve never seen a promotion for this reason - or anything close - in 30 years in engineering, including coaching hundreds of engineering leaders.
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.
While this may be a funny take, the real one I tend to see happening in the real world sometimes (and is mentioned by contrast in the post) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Incompetent nurses in the VA system get promoted to management so they do not harm any patients. I have seen it happen over and over again. They spend their time in meetings all day instead of in direct patient care.
Or it's the best option they have at that moment.
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 :)
The section marked “Examples” has no examples. Not even anecdotes. This is impressively lazy.
I'd be surprised if they called out Dave Mitchinson the incompetent lead project manager at GeneralMassiveTech Industries United LLC, but they probably should have just omitted the "Examples" heading entirely if they weren't going to name and shame.
I've seen the opposite happen (most competent person applying for promotion passed over because they are too hard to replace in their current role), but not incompetent people being managed up.
What (to me) is more common - unfireable incompetence is left to fester by avoidant management and then flushed by 24-36 month restructure cycles.
This is presented as a fact, but lacks documented real-world instances, direct measurements, or even any proxy measures that suggest it's actually happening.
A department chair at a university is usually not the most productive researcher, as far as I can tell. And if they are, they tend to leave the position quickly to refocus on research. As far as I've seen it is not unusual for people who are engaged with what they do to avoid admin tasks. A dynamic like that would seem to push less engaged or capable people into admin.
This was a deliberate and well-known policy in a large company that I worked - to promote incompetent ones to R&D department. This is used when firing them from job is too messy due to unionism etc. They are simply moved to R&D where whatever they do doesn't affect company's business.
Is that a promotion, though?
In some cases it was. In other cases, it was a move to a more relaxed work without goals.
I don’t understand the message the page design is supposed to send. Hierarchical areas and buttons just look ridiculous. If it’s AI design, good for you not wasting time doing something you don’t care about, but you could have equally communicated you didn’t care by making your essay plain text.
Companies do not promote anyone. People do. For all kinds of reason that are more personal/politics as the organization gets larger.
1. This entire page is written by an LLM. It is slop.
2. There is no evidence to support this at all, it is something a comic book author made up
...
Why didn’t they promote me?
A coworker at one of my former employers put it thus: People who can do engineering become engineers. People who get into engineering but can't do it become Six Sigma consultants.
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.
I think it's just that people who can't individually contribute end up doing... whatever else.
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.
Let's replace management with AI already. The investors can then remain the real management. To the extent a manager's work is not managerial, they shouldn't be called management.
I have never seen or heard of this happening. I have had managers who would not be able to do the grunt work, but they certainly weren't hired because they couldn't do that work.
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.
yes, and when you encounter one, think "pylon" and keeping your momentum, swerve hard and then correct for heading
Save yourself 5 minutes and just read the Wikipedia article on "The Dilbert Principal" it's more useful, has more content and doesn't have this atrocious layout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
Or take the ribbonfarm-pill and jump straight to Gervais Principle
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657678
> companies often promote struggling employees into management roles where their impact is perceived as less immediately harmful
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.
If you were suffering from Dunning-Krueger, how would you know?
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