The worst type of managers: incompetent managers

Note: crossposting from reddit, because I spent way too long on this to not have a backup.

Honestly, I have had a good number of managers and they all were bad in fairly different ways, but if I have to choose one single complaint, it is sheer incompetence.

Incompetent workers shoot themselves on their feet. When it is a manager*, and they make decisions that impact an entire team, metaphorically is like they are shooting themselves on their feet, making a hole in the boat on which the team is, so everybody drowns. Their bad decisions make work frustrating, unproductive, unrewarding, and sometimes plain impossible with respect to some deadlines.

You may think authoritarian managers will lead to poor decisions more often (not listening to other perspectives, facts, opinions, etc.) Certainly, authoritarianism does not help.

However, sheer incompetence is a greater problem. Off the top of my head, an incompetent and non-authoritarian manager:

• Will listen, but will not understand.
• Will explain the rationale, strategy, objectives, etc. They may be persuasive, but completely wrong, producing no outcome or the wrong outcome. (Sometimes the
• May let people work with autonomy, but without coordination or cooperation. This is fine (paid hobbies!) until their manager fires the entire team due to a lack of alignment with the organization, or not producing anything of value for the organization.
• In combination with the previous points, something of value may have been produced but not understood, and what is communicated is something else. Imagine producing a rocket, but the manager communicating it as a car, which is not competitive due to the cost per mile. The result is:
• The team fails at being relevant in the organization and producing value for it. (The value was produced, but not realized.)
• The organization fails at competing in the market, e.g. failing at competing both with Tesla and SpaceX, while the engineers may have produced something that would beat SpaceX.
• Incompetence, especially on a technical level, is often paired with a focus on politics, posing, stealing credit, and shifting blame. They found a way to get the job despite of their incompetence.
• The team culture and the way the team works may become “toxic”, with:
• an abundance of bullshit,
• a complete disregard for merit, competence, and
• a focus on the form over the content, e.g. PowerPoint with nice stock images, making no sense or being wrong in what is said. Especially considering the previous point, and the first point.

Authoritarianism results in incompetence (not listening means not learning, which means falling behind). But incompetence, even without authoritarianism is a far greater problem in my experience. Not all my bad managers were authoritarian, but all of them could get better at their work (they should, IMHO).

And of course, we have the authoritarians and situations where several of these problems and additional problems may overlap or may be hard to diagnose. I have avoided ambiguous points, e.g. wrongly pairing tasks with the skills of the people responsible. By Hanlon’s razor, I would consider that this is due to incompetence. However, occasionally, I have seen the result of not completely wrong pairings, and it is not smooth. In short, if the person responsible for doing something does actually know how to do it, they may make a good point of needing resources (time, data, computation power, access to the opinion of users, experts,…) to do things properly and professionally, and this may be undesirable for some managers that just want employees to produce shit, tick boxes, and not cause trouble. Therefore, I cannot say if this wrong pairing is the result of incompetence or a brilliant and perverse plan.

Nevertheless, authoritarianism would only be 4th in the ranking, which would be:

1. Incompetence.
2. Psychopaths.
3. Delusionists.
4. Authoritarians and micromanagers.
5. Absentee managers.

Psychopaths may be competent at taking advantage of the team and the organization. Meanwhile, they destroy everything, look like they are solving every problem, and have the best and most polite manners. They may be technically incompetent, as previously mentioned, but sometimes they may be reasonably competent at a technical level and just find “better” ways to thrive.

Delusionists may be competent at (indefinitely) keeping the delusion of smooth communication between their managers and the people they manage, even the communication with clients, results achieved, etc. However, without any tangible results, you are forced to sell the same delusion to get a new job. Delusionists may get to become billionaires by selling startups to big companies.

(Both previous overlap occasionally. Psychopaths may sometimes be good delusionists because it serves well their ambition. While delusionists may have collateral victims of their reality distortion fields. Nevertheless, I consider them as different groups.)

Authoritarians, micromanagers, and absentee managers are often discussed on the Internet. Therefore, I think this is enough for today’s rant. Thank you for the opportunity. I am trying to quit (previously similarly here, here, and here), so… “days since the last rant: 0”.

Hopefully, it is useful. HAND.

* and other decision-makers, sometimes they may be system architects, tech leaders, directors, or many other roles, even principal engineers.

Cross posted with permission.