Companies promote incompetent employees to management to limit damage they do

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• Hacker News
• Or 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 :)

  by h4kunamata
• 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.

  by bitwize
• 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
  by eranation
• I’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.

  by don_neufeld
• 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.

  by shermantanktop
• I'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.

  by sulam
• 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.
  by drob518
• 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.

  by fancyfredbot