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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have seen people not get promoted because they’re too competent, too good at their job. They’re too valuable to lose in their position.
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."
Yeah, this is so off-base. Or, OP has only ever worked at terribly bad companies.
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.
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'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.
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.
The section marked “Examples” has no examples. Not even anecdotes. This is impressively lazy.
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.
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.
Is that a promotion, though?
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.
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.
Companies do not promote anyone. People do. For all kinds of reason that are more personal/politics as the organization gets larger.
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.
Why didn’t they promote me?
1. 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
...
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.
yes, and when you encounter one, think "pylon" and keeping your momentum, swerve hard and then correct for heading
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
> 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.
If you were suffering from Dunning-Krueger, how would you know?
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