Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

I think a key error people often make is assuming that the line engineers are always right. If a decision pisses off the line engineers it must be idiotic! The manager must be a fool. Peter principle in action.

This surely happens sometimes. But I’ve personally witnessed a lot of engineers (especially junior engineers) who don’t give a shit about customers or shipping products or building alignment or communicating planning and impact. And to have a successful team/product/company you will need to aggravate them sometimes and they’ll post things on medium about how their boss sucks and that nobody should ever estimate anything or how all tech debt is awful or whatever.

Good managers should support their team’s growth and careers, which should hopefully eliminate some of the “my manager is an idiot” stuff but it can’t eliminate all of it.

> The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management style that employees feel good about actually helps the company thrive, then those companies that promote "bad" managers would go out of business and be replaced by ones that promote "good" management style.

I would argue that "bad" managers would generally have higher turnover than "good" managers. And I would further argue that companies have repeatedly demonstrated that high turnover isn't bad when the company is obscenely profitable despite that high turnover.

There are solutions to this problem.

My favorite was outlined in https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/... - namely treat different kinds of jobs as different skillsets and take away the perverse incentive to switch to one you might not be qualified for. Specifically, moving from being an individual contributor to a manager should come with an immediate pay cut. (With opportunities for a pay raise down the road if you prove competent.) And there should be a promotion track for individual contributors. Furthermore, most managers should manage someone who is higher paid than themselves.

When the perverse incentive is taken away, people are more likely to switch jobs because they think that they will be good at the new job, and not because they want to be important, well paid, or whatever.

But this does require a mindset from managers that they are in charge, but not necessarily more important. Which is a cultural shift that is easier in some organizations than others.

Often not. This is a really under looked at part of business. Sales is an excellent example. Most sales cultures are super super competitive. The natural inclination is to promote the best salespeople to be sales managers. But sales talent is a poor proxy for management talent, so you usually don’t get the best results (and your best sales people stop selling!). Resolving this is not easy, because it conflicts with people’s sense of fairness and how we think of career growth. You also need to do a lot of work if you want to figure out what a good management skill proxy is instead.

I've witnessed this first hand so often that I'm well aware of what it's caused by: overload at the top.

The end beneficial owners of a business have limited power over it. They exert weak control remotely. Usually this amounts to no more than "hire someone to run the business, reward him based on profits" (and sometimes barely even that).

That person, the CEO, also has limited control. He only has so much energy and time in a day.

Meanwhile, parasitism is the norm. The easiest way to get a promotion is to simply do less work and do more of what you want. Spending all day in meetings sounding important, going on junkets, playing around with new tech for fun, puttering around with emails instead of impactful work, etc. Then you're getting the same pay for less work.

Therefore it requires constant pressure from the top to retain alignment of the staff with profitability. How effective the CEO and his team is in suppressing politics, suppressing friendship based (vs meritocratic) promotions, suppressing false work / lazing (meetings & makework etc), will always hit a limit. It's just as much an area of ongoing development as anything else in business -- how to maintain the productivity of small teams as the organization grows and vice becomes harder to suppress.

So I think this is more likely the cause than people being promoted to the point of incompetence -- the organization grows to the limit of its leader's ability.