Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

To get rid of them.. a incompetent person is basically organizational tech debt.. and if you can move the tech debt away from you, abstract it.. the organization can recover and be more effective again. So up s/he goes, to be encapsulated in a personal little pearl of people, while to organisms capability suffer less.

Also remember, if you wouldnt promote the person away from you, you would basically demote or keep him around, neutral-moted. So your lack of support creates a antagonistic figure in your workplace.

So lets play nice, push the hr-failure to the waterhead, where they can pea-cock around with a harem of secretarys, and hopefully do neither good nor harm.

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 people get slighted simply because you can't possibly please everyone simultaneously while also trying to be valuable.

Management is a morass and I admire anyone that is actually "competent" at it. I don't envy them.

"As you move up the ladder you are constantly trading control for impact."

What a wonderfully succinct way of expressing this - it also captures why "control-motivated" people for want of a better description struggle so much with even the first steps of ceding that control. Great expression!

Feel like you somehow managed to hit the nail on the head while also completely missing the point. Absolutely agree that often the things that get you promoted and the things that are considered compentency in a manager aren't necessarily the things that make a subordinate view someone as competent. But completely disagree on what those traits are.

In my experience, management tends to view favorably things like delivering on time, and on budget even if the product is compromised. Engineers tend to prefer taking longer and making it correct. Management loves accurate reporting, over communication and documenting. A lot of engineers tend to hate that stuff. Not all but a lot. A manager who isn't technical, or particularly personable but who does a good job of communicating up and out, and choosing high impact projects will do well. Even if they aren't exactly beloved by their direct reports

Everyone is familiar with the Peter Principle at this point. I believe there is something to it, but it doesn't explain what we find in modern companies. It's too passive a mechanism to explain the malevolence that typically quickly develops in most successful companies.

The Gervais Priciple seems to much better explain the modern organization:

"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...