It’s extremely common in engineering. Some talented engineer might be a whiz at solving technical problems in complex systems — gotta reward that! Gotta promote that guy! Make him a Department Head!
So he gets promoted to manage a group of 25 people and shuffle papers all day, worrying about budget allocations, future staffing needs, and performance evaluations. It’s likely to be a bad fit. Meanwhile, the technical group just lost it’s top problem solver. Double ouch.
Exactly. People who are very competent technically and productive do NOT necessarily make good managers.
This is why I’ve studiously avoided management.
They used to tell us there was a “Management Ladder” and a “Technical Ladder”.
Well, all the raises and advancements went to the Management Ladder, DUH.
I can think of about one or two folks who advanced on the Technical Ladder. They were good, maybe not better than those who did not advance, but got noticed by schmoozing with the publicity process.
The real, competent technical folks did their job, and did not lobby for notoriety. So they did a lot of good work and did not use the paid project time for ‘publicity’. So it hurt them, salary-wise.
To the point that employees, good tech capability, took a management job to get an advance. Then might transfer back to tech. Did a poor job of management, messed up things, for the next guy (or the remaining tech folks) to fix.
Yep. and the engineer probably dislikes his new job, too.
Your example is a brief outline of my early employment history.
And yes, I’m an engineer! :)
Happens in the military all the time. The most competent people in non-combat roles are the E-5s. Enough experience to do their job well but with few responsibilities, and high enough in rank to get few sh*t details. Once you get to E-6, your duties increasingly shift to shuffling paperwork and “supervising”, i.e. sitting around reading the newspaper, drinking coffee and shooting the sh*t.
It’s for that reason alone I stayed in software engineering - although I was offered management many times.
I would suck at it. I just tell them give me a little raise and tell the new guy to rely on me for advice, or I’ll leave.
Often decided to leave, but called back when they fired the incompetent they hired. Usually at a significantly higher rate.