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Companies promote incompetent employees to management to limit damage they do
- BryantD 2mo agoThe section marked “Examples” has no examples. Not even anecdotes. This is impressively lazy.
- autoexec 2mo agoI'd be surprised if they called out Dave Mitchinson the incompetent lead project manager at GeneralMassiveTech Industries United LLC, but they probably should have just omitted the "Examples" heading entirely if they weren't going to name and shame.
- metalman 2mo agoyes, and when you encounter one, think "pylon" and keeping your momentum, swerve hard and then correct for heading
- hyperhello 2mo agoI don’t understand the message the page design is supposed to send. Hierarchical areas and buttons just look ridiculous. If it’s AI design, good for you not wasting time doing something you don’t care about, but you could have equally communicated you didn’t care by making your essay plain text.
- drob518 2mo agoI’ve never found this to actually be the case (that somebody promoted someone they thought was incompetent to “limit damage”). Yes, incompetent employees get promoted sometimes, but it’s typically because they have been brown-nosing an executive and the executive thinks they are actually talented.
- epolanski 2mo agoOh I've seen it many times especially in IT land, but almost always to middle management positions, almost never c-suite. Multiple times teams would end up losing their manager and the promotion felt to the one that losing as a contributor would hurt less. I've seen it happen outside IT too, e.g. in banking where a higher position also implied legal responsibility so it came with perils. But again middle managers, bank directors, stuff like that.
- MattPalmer1086 2mo agoI have never once seen this happen. Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people. I have seen less capable engineers who were more interested in management being promoted. Some engineers may interpret this as promoting incompetence, because many engineers only value engineering competence. Which is also why they don't get put in management positions.
- mjburgess 2mo ago> Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people This just isnt the case and suggests you have not been at a senior enough position to understand the dynamics of promotion into middle management from a the top-down pov. It is not uncommon for an incompetent person to be promoted in order to be a fall guy, to be setup to fail and take the blame -- to play one department against another, and so on. Promoting incompetent people can also surface their incompetence to others in ways that could be politically useful. This happens all the time.
- drob518 2mo agoI’ve been a VP at F500 companies and never seen it done deliberately. There are plenty of ways to manage poor performers out of an organizations. Promotion isn’t one of them.
- piloto_ciego 2mo agoArguably though, this is why it was a F500 company and not a poorly managed consulting firm headquartered in Des Moines or whatever. I’ve definitely seen something approaching this before, in different industries even.
- zer00eyz 2mo ago> companies often promote struggling employees into management roles where their impact is perceived as less immediately harmful I have never seen this actually happen. I have seen lots of people THINK that someone incompetent got the job over them. The issue is that most of the people who felt they deserved the job were definitely suffering from Dunning–Kruger.
- shermantanktop 2mo agoIf you were suffering from Dunning-Krueger, how would you know?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 2mo agoA coworker at one of my former employers put it thus: People who can do engineering become engineers. People who get into engineering but can't do it become Six Sigma consultants. I haven't seen companies actually promote incompetents into management. Usually they're just given their walking papers. The more charismatic or well-connected ones are given some sort of lateral career track, like from actual engineering into sales engineering or something. I have never been charismatic nor well-connected enough to pull this off.
- gustavus 2mo agoSave yourself 5 minutes and just read the Wikipedia article on "The Dilbert Principal" it's more useful, has more content and doesn't have this atrocious layout.
- Gander5739 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
- krackers 2mo agoOr take the ribbonfarm-pill and jump straight to Gervais Principle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657678
- eranation 2mo agoWhile this may be a funny take, the real one I tend to see happening in the real world sometimes (and is mentioned by contrast in the post) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- booleandilemma 2mo ago[dead]
- Tinned_Tuna 2mo agoThis is presented as a fact, but lacks documented real-world instances, direct measurements, or even any proxy measures that suggest it's actually happening.
- fancyfredbot 2mo agoIf you see someone incompetent being promoted then it's more likely: 1) You are wrong about them being incompetent 2) The person promoting them is also incompetent and has mistakenly promoted the wrong person. I have literally never seen or heard of anyone promoting someone to limit the harm they can do. It's something bitter people tell themselves to help them feel better about being passed over. It's not the explanation you are looking for.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoYeah, and i’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s the first one much more often than anyone here would like to admit. Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition. It’s not incompetent to do things that you wouldn’t do, or to do things that upset you, or to do things that don’t put your desires first.
- danielheath 2mo agoAlso, promotions can be a different job. I've seen a few senior developers who weren't great programmers, but could communicate effectively, manage up and down, etc. So long as they were willing to defer to others on harder technical topics, they usually made pretty good team leads when/if promoted.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- yndoendo 2mo agoThe person the company owner promoted ahead of me had me fired. I was principal designer for the company's main solutions. He couldn't design or write software solutions. He then stole source code I wrote along with product designs I created and went to the competition. Was taken to court and settled. Competitor never hired him. Schadenfreude! Never underestimate ass kissers and yes-men. It works wonders on narcissistic people.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoI think there's a third explanation: the person being promoted may indeed be incompetent at the job they have been doing, but be good at the skills required of a manager. I've seen that one happen. Management has very little in common (in terms of skills needed) with doing the work, so just because someone is bad at their current position doesn't mean they'll be a bad manager.
- sulam 2mo agoI've supported moving people from IC to manager easily 50+ times in my career and never once has it been to limit the damage someone can do. Also, this is not a promotion, it's a role change. Edit: btw, the premise is completely wrong. Managers can cause far more damage to teams than an IC on the team can cause.
- nzeid 2mo agoThe edit is dead on and this is the very first thing that crossed my mind. Bad managers hollow out companies. It's quite devastating.
- jamesfinlayson 2mo ago> Managers can cause far more damage to teams than an IC on the team can cause. Yep, and a bad manager tends to last a lot longer than a bad individual contributor.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoWhy didn’t they promote me?
- shermantanktop 2mo agoI've never seen this happen as a reaction to actual incompetence, where the person is a net negative and a drag on everyone. I have seen something similar, though: a valued employee doesn't have balanced functional skills at their current position, and yet is a net positive due to other factors. They are good at problem solving but bad at coding; they are great at oncall operations but bad at design; they are good at making others better but not great by themselves. They can either acquire the skills to be functionally competent alongside their peers, or management can give them responsibilities that allow them to contribute without actually having them be good at their current job. That's definitely flunking upward but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
- zkmon 2mo agoThis was a deliberate and well-known policy in a large company that I worked - to promote incompetent ones to R&D department. This is used when firing them from job is too messy due to unionism etc. They are simply moved to R&D where whatever they do doesn't affect company's business.
- fluoridation 2mo agoIs that a promotion, though?
- zkmon 2mo agoIn some cases it was. In other cases, it was a move to a more relaxed work without goals.
- manacit 2mo ago1. This entire page is written by an LLM. It is slop. 2. There is no evidence to support this at all, it is something a comic book author made up ...
- sinkasapa 2mo agoA department chair at a university is usually not the most productive researcher, as far as I can tell. And if they are, they tend to leave the position quickly to refocus on research. As far as I've seen it is not unusual for people who are engaged with what they do to avoid admin tasks. A dynamic like that would seem to push less engaged or capable people into admin.
- rixed 2mo agoCompanies do not promote anyone. People do. For all kinds of reason that are more personal/politics as the organization gets larger.
- ikr678 2mo agoI've seen the opposite happen (most competent person applying for promotion passed over because they are too hard to replace in their current role), but not incompetent people being managed up. What (to me) is more common - unfireable incompetence is left to fester by avoidant management and then flushed by 24-36 month restructure cycles.
- gste 2mo agoI think it's just that people who can't individually contribute end up doing... whatever else. And managers that hired those people don't want to admit that they are bad at hiring people. The Dunning-Kruger effect is very relevant here. Competent companies do not have this problem. Incompetent companies are completely oblivious to this problem.
- wakawaka28 2mo agoI have never seen or heard of this happening. I have had managers who would not be able to do the grunt work, but they certainly weren't hired because they couldn't do that work. For what it's worth I also think the Peter Principle aphorisms are wrong. These basically revolve around the assertion that many managers are incompetent because they got promoted based on competence at a lower role, and therefore if they have been at the same level for a while it implies they are not good enough to advance. Well, it's true that management is a different job function than the actual domain functions, but people can and do learn. It's also not mathematically possible to move up indefinitely, because there just aren't enough management roles for that. Unfortunately, some people take jokes too seriously, as I'm sure was done with this post.
- h4kunamata 2mo agoOr it's the best option they have at that moment. At my old job, my temporary manager was the Jenkins CICD guy who knew nothing that wasn't posted at StackOverflow. To give OP credit, the manager that was hired, knew nothing about nothing. He would take his dog for a walk during a system crash :) The new CTO was also incompetent, he spent more time with the business team than knowing how to write a simple script. One incompetent hired another incompetent. The company's warehouse firewall was exposed to the internet, their response?? pfSense is safe enough :)
- don_neufeld 2mo agoI’ve never seen a promotion for this reason - or anything close - in 30 years in engineering, including coaching hundreds of engineering leaders. What I HAVE seen is engineers who don’t understand the skills required for management thinking that this is what happened. Look at the provenance of this “principle” and its author make it pretty clear that’s really going on here.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoLet's replace management with AI already. The investors can then remain the real management. To the extent a manager's work is not managerial, they shouldn't be called management.
- uslic001 2mo agoIncompetent nurses in the VA system get promoted to management so they do not harm any patients. I have seen it happen over and over again. They spend their time in meetings all day instead of in direct patient care.