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.

> 1) You are wrong about them being incompetent

The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.

It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.

The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.

That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.

I've seen it in action a few times specifically in government.

It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.

Finance won't give them more headcount.

So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.

I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.

Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.

It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.

Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.

There's a subtlety to (1), in that people can be incompetent at things that don't matter, but competent at things that do, and people often latch on to the wrong incompetence.

For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.

A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.

Yeah, and i’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s the first one much more often than anyone here would like to admit.

Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition. It’s not incompetent to do things that you wouldn’t do, or to do things that upset you, or to do things that don’t put your desires first.

I have seen people not get promoted because they’re too competent, too good at their job. They’re too valuable to lose in their position.

3) You’re incorrect about the metrics being used to evaluate who to promote and they are not incompetent according to those metrics.

Incompetent people promoting incompetent people is called a kakocracy and is prevalent in large companies.

It just happened at my company. He produced problems in his team (at least from what I have heard) and now produces problems/friction for whatever team must interface with him and depend on him. I don't think anybody thought he's competent. The role didn't exist before, though (Chief of Test or something) and doesn't have real leverage. So he's in the meetings saying stuff but my feeling is that people mostly work around him and he generally doesn't know the answer to questions that fall within the scope of his role.

I feel bad for him to be honest, would be a very tough spot/role to be in anyway and he seems not be able to enable himself being actually productive.

Yeah, this is so off-base. Or, OP has only ever worked at terribly bad companies.

This does occur but not in a way that often creates this situation.

Someone in management who has failed to meet goals will often have a position created for them with no reports. This is normally an advisory role to not impact them negatively for future roles and to give them runway to leave.

I’ve seen it twice and only in higher level roles.

It happens and I’ve seen it many times. But it’s only worthwhile at the C-suite level or equivalent.

Perhaps the most common is to “promote” a CEO to vice chairman of the board.

I heard about a very incompetent engineer at the start of my career.

Always asking dumb questions. Asking other people to create "sample projects" for her.

She is now a principal PM manager where I work now. She has no idea I know her from our prior company 20 years ago, but surely it is the same person. You do not get to that level without what it takes.

I think there's a third explanation: the person being promoted may indeed be incompetent at the job they have been doing, but be good at the skills required of a manager. I've seen that one happen. Management has very little in common (in terms of skills needed) with doing the work, so just because someone is bad at their current position doesn't mean they'll be a bad manager.

3) the person who promoted them likes them.

Another option that I've seen repeatedly is people with excellent technical competence being put in positions of management or leadership, where they are incompetent with the requisite skills for those roles.