I don't think that's the case (having spent several years in both the IC and management tracks). An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While compar

I don't think that's the case (having spent several years in both the IC and management tracks). An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy. On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success. There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation. So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.