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Comment by mattwritescode | Hacker News Reader

Because people generally fail upwards.

Take for example a poor developer who keeps breaking things. It can actually be difficult to get rid of someone. So the company instead makes him a low level manager (no longer directly touching code).

Yes! he comes up with stupid ideas etc, but, his team know he is wrong so they just work around the stupidity.

In a couple of years of poor management from this junior manager (who team keeps working through). Upper management (who forgot how bad a developer he was) think GOD! he has done a good job; his team get things done. Lets promote him.

Bad manager is now in a higher position again.

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"Managing upwards" is also a skill in and of itself; I've had the misfortune to work for a couple of managers like that - very skilled at personally taking the credit for anything their team does, and also for scapegoating one of their team when things go wrong.

This taught me a great truth tho': the people at level N+1 compared to you in a company, are there because they have the support of people at level N+2. Unless your problem is such that you can attract the attention of people at level N+3 to it, your options are extremely limited.

There are programmers who can't hack that. You just can't let people take credit for your work.

Sometimes managers will take credit without the person ever knowing. It's hard to take credit for your own work when you don't have a communication channel with people above you. Managers do and you can't stop them for saying a piece of work is there's when really a team member did all the real work and the manager just put their name on it. The manager knows that the likelihood of the person communicating with his peers is small or non-existent and the person will never find out.

It's a good thing to let your manager take credit for your work--if you like them. If they don't, all they're left with is the blame when things go wrong. (I find it a little strange to see people in this thread saying they've had managers who successfully blamed everything on their subordinates: they must never have been managers, or worked at very strange companies. A manager generally gets a higher salary and some perks, but they are extremely dispensable if they don't produce results--it doesn't matter who's not producing them; it's their job to facilitate it.)

As long as they're not an asshole about it, and you enjoy working with them, you should do what you can to make your manager look good, otherwise you might get another one. Once your manager moves up the ranks or joins another company, they will invite you (why wouldn't they? You make them look good.)

ha ha

This old SGI post-mortem has a nice section on management, about halfway down the page. The contention there is that optimists get promoted. I have seen incompetence promoted (to get rid of people), but not as often as optimists.

http://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html

This is The Dilbert Principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle]. Note that this is a humourous (although sadly often true) variation to The Peter Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle] which is very much what the main article describes.

Its very rare for a poor performer to get a promotion like that.

Generally in big companies especially, if you do well at development and promote yourself you'll become a manager regardless of managerial ability. You then get to micro manage the bad developers you mention.

But Ive never heard of someone getting promoted due to poor performance.

I was once told, effectively: "we didn't promote you because you're too valuable where you are (senior-level engineer)". Needless to say, I left a few weeks later.

Performance can be very hard to measure, particularly for non-technical managers.

It's not at all obvious that you would leave. Not knowing the specifics, a lot of us would lean toward asking for a pay raise rather than be promoted to the level of our incompetence.

I just think that a promotion shouldn't automatically entail moving into management. At my company the engineer ladder and the management ladder are different (though you can transfer between them if you like). I can get promoted 5 more times (NOT gonna happen, I'm hoping for 2 in the next 5 years) before I get stalled out. And people that are 5 levels above me are effectively gods.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. But apparently hcayless is not in the same situation but still got offended when they weren't promoted.

I don't know that it's rare, but I've experienced it a number of times. I think the key to it is 'low-level'. To avoid the big step of firing someone, they 'promote' them to a position where they are considered mostly harmless. Of course, they forget that over time things change, people leave, etc., and this low-level person ends up getting to a position where they can wield their stupidity in a damaging way.

ditto, except once they became low-level mgmt instead of letting people work around them they put a chokehold on all information flow for the sake of take the credit / shifting the blame, & eventually the project basically got scrapped because of these narcissistic boobs abusing their power & killing morale. i am thinking this is not so rare in consulting...

The guy that keeps screwing up is often the guy who then pulls an all-nighter to save the day.

This is a subtle point that is often missed. It's the same reason that butt-in-chair hours has a real effect on how those above you perceive your work. Being visible doing Good Things is often more important than not doing the bad things in the first place when it comes to careers.

Why not firing him in the first place ?

If he's useless as a dev and hasn't the knack for management, then he is useless (in this position).

Business wise that's the only thing that makes sense.

HR law in much of Europe can make it VERY difficult to fire someone unless they commit an act of "Gross Misconduct".

I used to work with an Italian company (via acquisition) that suffered from these kinds of troubles. You can't demote someone, you can't get rid of them, so they get a "sideways promotion" to something like a "project manager" or "team leader". Eventually this leads them into a managerial position. There were so many incompetent people in management at that company... their job was literally just to pass information down the chain. Meetings were hell because every project had 5 layers of managers that wanted to be involved.

This only happens when management is poor. Good management will simply fire incompetent people unless they would in fact make good managers. In my experience, underperformers are: 1) fired, 2) transferred to a department that doesn't matter, or 3) admitted to a training program to develop their skills.

What planet do you live on? This shit never happens.

This shit happens all the time, especially at large corporations where political connections matter more than ability in any other area. I personally witnessed it at two of my former employers.

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