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Having worked at a couple of large companies where, unfortunately, incompetent managers were the norm, I'd wondered quite a bit as well how incompetent people g

Having worked at a couple of large companies where, unfortunately, incompetent managers were the norm, I'd wondered quite a bit as well how incompetent people get into positions of power. I think one explanation is that the ability to rise within an organization (political skill) is orthogonal to the ability to be competent at your job role (technical skill). So you see a lot of VPs of engineering who have absolutely no clue how to build a product, and have never built anything of value, who rose through the ranks and got there because they know how to "work the system". Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare. This is of course no different from the reason why politicians are generally so terrible at their job. (Why Todd Akin, of "Legitimate Rape" fame, is on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology, for example.)

stephencanon 13y ago
I assume that Akin is on that committee because his party recognizes that he's bonkers and tucked him away on an unimportant committee where he can't screw anything up too publicly.
rglovejoy 13y ago
Akin is on the Science, Space and Technology committee because it is not a very good committee to be on. It doesn't oversee much funding, so it gets filled with hacks placed there by the House leadership. Any representative with ambition and talent is going to want to be on the good committees, such as Armed Services or Ways and Means, which have huge responsibilities and the attention of lobbyists.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  Unfortunately Akin was on the House Budget and Armed Services committees as well (a subcommittee on the latter, but still). I just picked Science because it was the most ridiculous assignment of the three, but I would be very surprised if he was actually really good at the other two.
RougeFemme 13y ago
Another gender-neutral, oldie-gut-goodie explanation. . .the Peter Principle. . .rising to your level of incompetence. . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
btilly 13y ago
Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare. They might not be rare if more organizations had a smarter idea about the actual job a VP of technology needs to perform. One of the best VPs of technology that I ever worked for saw it as his job to use his considerable abilities at playing politics to guarantee that no tech person below him had to deal with any political BS. He himself had no ability to work with technology, and everyone knew it. But he knew who did and enabled them to do their job. Every technical person in that organization understood and valued this about him. As he moved from company to company, they would voluntarily seek him out. And now that he founded his own company, the fact that people who have worked for him wanted to work with him again proved to be one of his biggest assets.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  > He himself had no ability to work with technology... But he knew who did Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics. However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.) The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.
  - btilly 13y ago
    However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. This is where you're wrong. You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters. What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.
aestra 13y ago
Todd Akin isn't the only one saying stupid things about rape. "Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Stephen F. Freind (Pennsylvania House of Representatives) "In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out." - Jodie Laubenberg (Texas House of Representatives) "I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape." — Chuck Winder (Idaho Senate) "Well, bad weather is like rape: if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it." — Clayton Williams (Texas Gubernatorial Candidate) (this comment was a "joke") "Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman." - Douglas Henry (Tennessee State Senate) "Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." - James Leon Holmes (Federal Judge) "The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant" - Henry Aldridge (North Carolina House of Representatives)
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  I was taught the "rape prevents conception" myth in my liberal condoms-on-bananas high school health class, and I suspect others were too. I have no idea if it was part of the curriculum or just an off the cuff remark from a misinformed teacher, but the idea came from somewhere, and it can't be exclusive to Republican politicians. I really do suspect other people had been taught this, but pretended they'd never heard it so they could lash out with more righteous indignation and outrage, rather than accept some people honestly believe wrong things they were taught.

stephencanon 13y ago

I assume that Akin is on that committee because his party recognizes that he's bonkers and tucked him away on an unimportant committee where he can't screw anything up too publicly.

rglovejoy 13y ago

Akin is on the Science, Space and Technology committee because it is not a very good committee to be on. It doesn't oversee much funding, so it gets filled with hacks placed there by the House leadership. Any representative with ambition and talent is going to want to be on the good committees, such as Armed Services or Ways and Means, which have huge responsibilities and the attention of lobbyists.

nairteashop 13y ago
Unfortunately Akin was on the House Budget and Armed Services committees as well (a subcommittee on the latter, but still). I just picked Science because it was the most ridiculous assignment of the three, but I would be very surprised if he was actually really good at the other two.

RougeFemme 13y ago

Another gender-neutral, oldie-gut-goodie explanation. . .the Peter Principle. . .rising to your level of incompetence. . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

btilly 13y ago

Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare. They might not be rare if more organizations had a smarter idea about the actual job a VP of technology needs to perform. One of the best VPs of technology that I ever worked for saw it as his job to use his considerable abilities at playing politics to guarantee that no tech person below him had to deal with any political BS. He himself had no ability to work with technology, and everyone knew it. But he knew who did and enabled them to do their job. Every technical person in that organization understood and valued this about him. As he moved from company to company, they would voluntarily seek him out. And now that he founded his own company, the fact that people who have worked for him wanted to work with him again proved to be one of his biggest assets.

nairteashop 13y ago
> He himself had no ability to work with technology... But he knew who did Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics. However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.) The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.
- btilly 13y ago
  However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. This is where you're wrong. You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters. What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.

aestra 13y ago

Todd Akin isn't the only one saying stupid things about rape. "Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Stephen F. Freind (Pennsylvania House of Representatives) "In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out." - Jodie Laubenberg (Texas House of Representatives) "I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape." — Chuck Winder (Idaho Senate) "Well, bad weather is like rape: if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it." — Clayton Williams (Texas Gubernatorial Candidate) (this comment was a "joke") "Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman." - Douglas Henry (Tennessee State Senate) "Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." - James Leon Holmes (Federal Judge) "The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant" - Henry Aldridge (North Carolina House of Representatives)

nsxwolf 13y ago
I was taught the "rape prevents conception" myth in my liberal condoms-on-bananas high school health class, and I suspect others were too. I have no idea if it was part of the curriculum or just an off the cuff remark from a misinformed teacher, but the idea came from somewhere, and it can't be exclusive to Republican politicians. I really do suspect other people had been taught this, but pretended they'd never heard it so they could lash out with more righteous indignation and outrage, rather than accept some people honestly believe wrong things they were taught.