I was in your exact same position. No amount of perseverance and high quality work convinced management I would be a much better fit than the current lead, even

I was in your exact same position. No amount of perseverance and high quality work convinced management I would be a much better fit than the current lead, even if it was obvious to everybody in the team. It took almost a year, and the lead organically destroyed himself: the project became an unmanageable mess, people were uninspired and almost nothing was delivered. One whole year. Management abruptly decided to fire the lead and gave me the opportunity: with bitterness in my mouth, I did it and the project was a success from every point of view: people were happy, the technical problems were solved with an eye towards scalability and future (unfortunately we had to throw away 90% of what was done earlier and rebuild it based on common building blocks idiomatic within the company), and I went to battle with management whenever unreasonable requests would come through in order to avoid engineers burning out. It took several months of hard work: eventually, when the project was almost completely on track, they removed me and installed another lead, with the excuse “You have done a really fantastic job recovering the ship and we are really grateful! Now that the project is stable We are putting someone with better management experience so you can focus on what’s important, the code”. I kept asking for feedback, and received nothing but praises for “saving the project and inspiring the team”. It left me baffled. I quit shortly after. Coworkers later told me that they were quite uninspired by this new guy who introduced a very micro management style without having ever gained trust of the team, and several of them quit or moved to other teams. What a bummer. I really will never understand why management doesn’t strongly favor promoting from the inside and prefer taking chances with external hires with whom they spent 60 minutes interviewing and will most likely turn out to be bozos with an inflated resume (which is even harder to spot than engineers with technical skills) screwing up the team.