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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 :)

The section marked “Examples” has no examples. Not even anecdotes. This is impressively lazy.

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.

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.

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.

Companies do not promote anyone. People do. For all kinds of reason that are more personal/politics as the organization gets larger.

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.

Let's replace management with AI already. The investors can then remain the real management. To the extent a manager's work is not managerial, they shouldn't be called management.

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.

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.

> 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.

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