Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

1) Your colleague is not managing. They are politicking. A good manager gives credit where due and listens to the people doing the work.

2) You don’t want to work in a culture that rewards politics over solid engineering. They need to coexist, by staying in their own lanes.

3) It’s too late with this role. Move on and bring these lessons with you.

The alternative is a fairly ugly and costly series of discussions and confrontations with the company during which you will need to make the argument that what you say is happening is happening and you will need to change the company culture along the way in order to win those battles.

Not worth your time or energy.

You write version 1 quick and dirty to get it out the door fast. Version 1 is written to acquire customers. You write version 2 to patch over all the problems of version 1. Version 2 is written to retain customers, but it ends up as an unmaintainable mess.

In version 3, you finally get to throw out the old code base and take the time to write clean, architected, maintainable code. Version 3 is written to attract and retain developers. Once it reaches parity with version 2, you can do the "Big Migration", and then start adding features. Version 4 and up are all built on 3, but barely anyone ever gets that far.

Note that this won't match up with the version numbers written into the software. You can't do anything about those, because marketing and management tells you what they have to be. Anecdotally, most software projects never progress past version 2, no matter how high their marketing numbers go. This is because version 3 does not directly add to the bottom line. It adds to developer productivity, and if the company cannot measure the value of developer productivity already, there will never be a business case for it. We all want to work on version 1 or version 3, because version 2 is a never-ending nightmare slog of one problem after another, but version 2 is that gaping hole that businesses will just keep throwing their money into, forever. And version 4 is easy and boring, where the only hard work is in upholding the process that is keeping the less experienced coders from cluttering up the place.

OP's mistake was in writing version 3 before telling management why that would be a "Good Idea That Saves Money" and seeking their mandate, and in not owning the successful completion as a major accomplishment. OP's current manager always understood that people run the company, not the code. That's not incompetent; it's a competence OP doesn't currently understand.

What you describe is not incompetence at all. It just sounds like this person has aspirations for management and you don't. Personally, I believe that it's best to lead from the front meaning that one should demonstrate to the people he/she is trying to lead that one really knows their stuff.

That being said, it sounds like now this person actually is responsible for managing you now so it appears their tactics paid off. Unless this person is asking you to write bad code or implement designs that don't make sense, there's really no issue other than your resentment towards this person. you got to let it go. That stuff is poison.

>The business is almost never paying to you clean up technical debt. They are paying you to generate revenue (or save costs). Period.

So true. Once you're in enterprise nobody cares that you wrote the connection pool yourself (which I did and nobody gave a darn). I did 5 years in enterprise and decided that was enough for a lifetime.

>Nobody gets credit for building a system that never goes down.

This happened to me. I designed and wrote a subsystem that is used by every GM dealership around the world and that thing never went down meanwhile my colleagues project was always down yet folks from the other team were the ones that got promoted.