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Comment by cowls | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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