Companies Promote Incompetent Employees to Management to Limit Damage
Companies promote incompetent employees to management tolimit damage they can do
The Dilbert Principle, introduced by Scott Adams in 1996, satirizes a common corporate practice: promoting underperforming employees into management to minimize their impact on hands-on work. This cynical view highlights that while lower-level employees do real work, some managers add little value. The principle resonates because many organizations default to promoting engineers into management without considering fit, leading to bad decisions and eroded trust. Modern tech companies combat this with dual career tracks, offering technical and managerial paths, and preferring coaching or termination over promoting incompetence.
When promotion replaces accountability, management layers fill with people lacking either technical credibility or leadership ability.
- fancyfredbot
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.
- drob518
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.
- sulam
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.
- don_neufeld
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.
- eranation
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