Incompetence

Peter's principle says, in a hierarchically structured organisation, everyone will eventually be working in their level of incompetence. The reason behind is simple - promotion as reward will encourage people who has well or out performed in their current roles to new ones where they will not be familiar nor comfortable.

Scott Adam coined Dilbert's principle, in which he explains that companies tend to systematically promote least competent employee to management - to limit the amount of damage they will be capable of doing. Sounds much more fun, huh? By intentionally, Dilbert thinks the upper layers of an organisation is of no or little relevance to the productivity, which in fact is mostly achieved by the 'blue-collar' workers.

In a world where efficiency, contribution, competence are valuable attributes we are looking for in employee, how could management have been given such a bad name?

Let's see who are the managers first. Mainly there are two groups concerned. First group consists of those who have sweat and bleed on the front line enough to impress the boss and been rewarded with a manager's hat. Most of them have or had solid hands on engineering skills and confident in their interpretation and judgement over technicality of the future problems, with which they are about to be tested on regular basis. In the second group, we have people who have been given the benefit of the doubt for their background. Unfortunately, the size of this group is surprisingly and unfortunately large.

For folks who have finally fought their ways through to manager's position, it is a strange, exciting, and unease situation to be. Suddenly it seems there are way too many technical morons around you, rather than you have to sharpen your head like a nut to get boss's attention back in your engineer days; also, you feel privileged that finally you can fix all the stupid calls your boss have made in the past because he seemed to know nothing about nothing. After a while, you realise this is a completely different game - your superior technical strength will not help you surf through the tangled political mine field; your sharpness has been considered by your peers as arrogance and difficult to communicate; you have kissed good bye to the luck of having concentrated 42 minutes on one particular problem without being distracted; you also start to realise you have no fricking clue what is going on in your boss's mind or does he have one as there is just so little quantitative measurable around here.; finally, damn it, "I have missed my morning coffee again!". Being an exceptional engineer doesn't automatically qualify you to manage. If the reason you have been given the management responsibility is entirely based on the fact you appeared to have outperform in your last role, I can tell you now, it was the wrong decision. You have now been officially pushed into a strange land, to which you may not have any real interests at all. At the bottom of your heart, you are probably screaming every morning, "fuck that, I just want to hack!".

Right, now to the bad side, for those have developed their career by avoiding risks and responsibilities as much as possible but somehow able to sneak their way through step by step. How to identify these people? Easy enough, lines they tend to use a lot is, "yes, I have done exactly same thing before". Then when you ask just a little bit more, he will starts to wave the flags to get out of the confrontation as quick as possible with line like "I don't want to hang up on the details on this for too long". I guess Dilbert is right after all, for group B, the best thing to do is to keep them in the management position, of course if your company can afford it, that way at least he will cause no direct damage to whatever it is you are trying to achieve, hopefully.