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Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

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Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#91

Post by TuringNYC »

tmn wrote: post #82
TuringNYC wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is even worse. For companies without SME tracks, SMEs find themselves getting almost no raises or comp despite contributing to more and more revenue and/or important/complex work. Then you see stupid things happen, like they find need for and hire 2 or 3 people just so they can justify a 5% raise. Then they find need for and hire more people to justify another 10% raise. Suddenly you have a company with many FTEs…

I'm at a company that does a good job of presenting a branching ic track that compensates at or above management. The issue is no one wants to become a team lead now. Worse work, more annoying responsibility, similar pay

Sounds like a good policy. But i'm surprised by the outcome -- generally different people are attracted to different routes. Not everyone deserves to be a senior IC/SME.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#92

Post by michaelmrose »

derekp7 wrote: post #50
mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company? The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management sty…

It's common to believe that natural selection leads to an efficient effective result. This is a false and inapplicable. In the first place natural selection just means that the least defective, insofar as survival is concerned, changes that randomly occur pass on to the next generation. There is no guarantee of forward progress along any axis.

Secondly a human power structure a created thing needn't follow any such law. Success in society often depends more on perception than any objective measure of success. While bad decision making can put one out of business eventually there is no guarantee that the ones that follow will be more rational.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#93

Post by menckenjr »

eppp wrote: post #24
snegu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the exact same boat as you. I'm currently interviewing for individual contributor roles and trying to accept the fact that I'm going to have to take a pay cut. I think it will be worth it, though, to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile again.

I dont think I understood or appreciated how unpleasant being a manager is. I like working and doing actual work. What does "incompetent" even mean. Dealing with personnel issues or actually doing valuable work? You get pulled away from doing things of value by having to deal with the interpersonal things that you don't want to do. But you have to do them because people are people. As a result, some of those same peo…

I had a similar experience when I went from being an IC to a hybrid IC/Manager role at a smaller company. My day went from designing, coding and testing to babysitting, bird-dogging HR and Payroll issues, running interference to keep the executives out of my developers' hair and about 10% of my day coding. I'm glad I have the experience but 10/10 would not do it again.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#94

Post by agumonkey »

nullc wrote: post #36

I wonder how many people who reference "The Peter Principle" have actually read it? It's short-- maybe 100 pages long-- and IMO not particularly good. It's essentially just a pile of brief vignettes about incompetent people being promoted, many of which feel like they were largely made up for the book. "There once was a guy named bob. He was bad at his job and got promoted. So there." ---- it is not quite that bad bu…

Started but lost interest after 50 pages. Too much commenting about itself. And the grandiose "you will understand everything after this book" didn't match the words I was reading.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#95

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

majormajor wrote: post #90
amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This attitude is what I've usually seen from management, and junior engineers are often the ones who fight against this attitude, before they get too jaded and leave. Management will dishon…

> This attitude is what I've usually seen from management, and junior engineers are often the ones who fight against this attitude, before they get too jaded and leave. Management will dishonestly claim successful delivery with zero regard for the actual product, and then force the engineers into 24/7 oncall. Or do junior engineers build a broken system because they don't know better which results in them having to c…

That’s possible but not what I’ve seen. I’m on ML teams, the junior engineers often come in with a good CS background and sometimes good software engineering practices, while the highly credentialed senior scientists often refuse to even write unit tests.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#96

Post by blaser-waffle »

chrisdhoover wrote: post #63
aazaa wrote: post #29

Read The Gervais Principle . https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Read it the last time it was mentioned here. It makes me sad and a little paranoid

It's a great read -- utterly dark and hilarious -- but don't take it too seriously. The author goes out of his way to keep things cynical, and though he uses The Office as a set of examples, he neglects a lot of scenes in The Office that completely negate his points.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#97

Post by thrownaway954 »

this is such a blanket statement. i use to have a manager that was an unbelievable programmer and dba. he was an absolute pleasure to work with and THE best manager to date i have ever had. this dude deserved the promotion. he applied the principals he knew as a programmer so things got done and the timelines weren't unrealistic at all. he also respected us and didn't forget where he came from.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#98

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school.

Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#99

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

Yes.

Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school.

Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#100

Post by blaser-waffle »

francisofascii wrote: post #11

> In practice people gravitate to, hire and promote individuals they like to be around, not people who demand accountability....especially when the ship is smooth sailing. > However, when a company needs to grow or is in a crisis, CEOs or the Board would often hire highly competent and pushy executives, to crack the whip and fix the boat. Accountability and performance become important attributes. This is super inter…

40 hours a week is roughly a 3rd of your working week. Like a full 1/3 of Mon-Fri is spent working. For executives and managers, those working hours are probably greater -- like 50+ sometimes.

If you're looking at spending 1/3 of your life sleeping, and another 1/3 doing work related stuff, why not spend it around people that are tolerable to be around? That's a huge chunk of your life.

Imagine spending 25 years working with assholes.

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