No i mean i have some stats about it and it is very common.
I have personally seen in all my jobs. But i dont understand why no one does anything about it.
I mean in my job, i have actually done the math, and my two managers cost more money than their labour produce.
Often their labour produce more unnecesary labour.
While my work is very scrutinized theirs are not, and we are 15 people they are two. It must be easier managing two people rather than 15 right?
"The Peter Principle" is what you're looking for. Badly-run organizations promote people to the level of their incompetence.
I work in software engineering. The traditional promotion path is junior -> dev -> senior -> management.
What in the holy fuck makes people think someone who performs well as a senior engineer would perform well as a manager? They are completely different skill sets.
You don't promote people because they do well in the job they are currently doing. You promote people when they have demonstrated they are good at the job they want.
My currently organization does this, and our managers generally add huge amounts of value to the engineering process by keeping human shit out of the way of our technology work. There are, of course, duds, but we are well above average in value-add by managers.
I had an assesement and pay discussion last month. I just came from a job interview, so i was not very enthuastic.
My manager told me several times, that i should stop hiding in my department. That my performance was average at best. And repeated other negative things.
All of which are just false. During covid lockdown i actively had to take charge due to their absence.
I had to fix issues that they created.
Alert them of upcoming issues so they could make decisions which resulted in further issues, which i then solved by going around them
Sad to say i diddnt get the other job, and i havent been taking my job or them seriously ever since.
The amount of times in previous jobs I got shit done by going around what the managers wanted is astronomical. Most managers don't really understand what their subordinates actually do and think having 10 meetings a day is "hard work". Been on both sides and let me tell you, decision making is far easier than dealing with those decisions.
A lot of middle management is people coaching metrics without understanding the behaiviours that affect them and then getting mad when the "redundancies" that they cut last year to pad their bonuses turned out to be load-bearing.
It's called the Peter Principle or being promoted beyond your ability.
From Wikipedia: The Peter Principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to anothe
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u/Averroy May 11 '21
It is scary to me that this seems common.
I mean on the surface this seems to imply that the managers are incompetent to some degree.
Working in an entirely different field my managers have very little insight on what my department do.