Early in my career I worked for a small company that was acquired by an obnoxiously large megacorp (about 40k employees). The business unit we were merged into

Early in my career I worked for a small company that was acquired by an obnoxiously large megacorp (about 40k employees). The business unit we were merged into was run by a retired Army general. His divisions beneath him were run by retired Colonels and so on down the line until they got to former Captains, Lieutenants, and if no other choice former enlisted. Over a year or two what started to happen was when former small-corp people came up for promotion, they were evaluated for former military service, and then if they didn't have any (the majority of the company) they were silently rejected for promotion and another person from either big-corp or outside were brought in who just happened to fit precisely into this giant chain of command under "the general". To get even more ridiculous, in some cases extremely experienced and capable former small-corp managers were replaced by "a guy I knew from officer's school" who turned out to be a failed JAG officer (military lawyer) -- as one of many examples. In another case a technical software manager was replaced with a former helicopter pilot with a (previously known) very bad drinking problem and never showed up to work but who "had served together in Bosnia". Still I worked hard there and sort of didn't believe the situation and there were other working benefits I enjoyed (lots of travel). When it came time for my own promotion my boss (former Senior enlisted) set me up to replace him with no other candidates. I was turned down and for lack of another candidate they selected a former Jr. enlisted who had been dishonorably discharged, had active ethics investigations against him in the company, and spent most of his work days surfing Facebook. Oh, when he got the position they also gave him a corporate award for work that I and my team had done. Lesson learned, I resigned the next day. Now I look for these kind of mindless institutional hierarchies as red flags to either not take a job or to move on quickly once I discover it.