If 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.
The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.
It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.
The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.
That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.
Yeah, 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.
> Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition.
It isn't just developers. I once lived in an area with a high concentration of MechEs and EEs who conspicuously identified themselves as "engineers" and used it as an excuse to pontificate on everything: software development, IT, education, cooking, live music production, car repair, you name it. You see, they're trained in problem solving, so they can fix just about anything. In a rich bit of irony this same crowd would also get especially upset if you used the term "software engineer" because "engineer" is a legally-protected term [1] and the engineer police will haul you off to engineer jail for calling yourself one if you don't have an engineering degree. Unless you drive a train. There's a specially-engineered carve out for train drivers.
[1] In the US it isn't unless you're calling yourself a Professional Engineer in specific contexts
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.
There's a subtlety to (1), in that people can be incompetent at things that don't matter, but competent at things that do, and people often latch on to the wrong incompetence.
For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.
A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.
Literally heard that someone wasn’t promoted to a VP role because they were too good at their job as a Director and promoting them would lose their competency.
So; instead of having a competent VP leading a team of absolute incompetents and changing the direction and capabilities of that entire org, we lost a capable leader to another company.
Leadership politics and maneuvering is fucking stupid.
Yeah, I think this is the most defensible steelman of the concept: Incompetent people aren't deliberately sought out for promotions, but there is a disincentive to promote some of the most competent people. Sometimes. For some very context-dependent notions of "(in)competent."
I 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.
I'm so happy to see this reply chain at the top of this thread. I really wish we could stamp out the snobbery of software engineers thinking they understand everything about everything because they understand Rust. As the current topical example, AI companies saying they can replace XYZ professions with LLMs. Doctor's for instance, don't just do diagnosis and data processing. A huge part of the job is sympathy and understanding. Although I'm sure someone will say that AI can fake that too.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Another option that I've seen repeatedly is people with excellent technical competence being put in positions of management or leadership, where they are incompetent with the requisite skills for those roles.
I’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.
Oh 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.
I 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.
I'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.
While 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
I'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.
A 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.
I'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.
This is presented as a fact, but lacks documented real-world instances, direct measurements, or even any proxy measures that suggest it's actually happening.
This 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
A 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.
Save 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.
> 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.
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.
The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.
It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.
The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.
That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.
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.
It isn't just developers. I once lived in an area with a high concentration of MechEs and EEs who conspicuously identified themselves as "engineers" and used it as an excuse to pontificate on everything: software development, IT, education, cooking, live music production, car repair, you name it. You see, they're trained in problem solving, so they can fix just about anything. In a rich bit of irony this same crowd would also get especially upset if you used the term "software engineer" because "engineer" is a legally-protected term [1] and the engineer police will haul you off to engineer jail for calling yourself one if you don't have an engineering degree. Unless you drive a train. There's a specially-engineered carve out for train drivers.
[1] In the US it isn't unless you're calling yourself a Professional Engineer in specific contexts
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.
For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.
A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.
So; instead of having a competent VP leading a team of absolute incompetents and changing the direction and capabilities of that entire org, we lost a capable leader to another company.
Leadership politics and maneuvering is fucking stupid.
I understand the thinking but if you tell someone that, you have to offer something in lieu of upward mobility. Money, perks, status, something.
You definitely don’t tell them (as happened here) how critical they are to your business and at the same time tell them you want to cut their bonuses.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bad managers hollow out companies. It's quite devastating.
What (to me) is more common - unfireable incompetence is left to fester by avoidant management and then flushed by 24-36 month restructure cycles.
2. There is no evidence to support this at all, it is something a comic book author made up
...
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.
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.
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.
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.