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Comment by gerad | Hacker News Reader

Or do the obvious: move them into management. This sounds snarky, but I'm not being sarcastic. Part of management is making people feel happy and supported, and you don't need the same level of competence in management that you do in IC work (or rather you need a different set of competencies, which they may have).

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This right here. I personally know several examples; people who were not really incompetent, but were not up to the generally expected level of work of an IC. They became excellent managers.

That's the idea behind the Dilbert comics [1]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

The Dilbert comics assume people moved to management due to incompetence will remain incompetent in a leadership role. This is a big leap - people management is a separate skillset, and in fact it's less likely a 10x programmer will also be a 10x manager. For the same reason that Shohei Ohtani is a unicord - it's hard to find someone who is a superlative performer in 2 sets of skills compared to just 1.

It does not sound snarky, it sounds right. Promoting a stereotypical fantastic engineer into management is a great way to waste their talent. Promoting a people person into a management role will make them happier and the team happier. The only thing that saddens me about this approach is that middle managers can earn more than senior engineers in tech companies, and sometimes becoming a manager or a lead is seen as a natural career progression path.

Promoveatur ut amoveatur, a time-tested strategy.

You don’t want too many incompetent people in management. This will result in your competent ICs becoming incredibly frustrated, leaving you with only the incompetent remaining. Good luck fixing that.

That can actually be a great solution.

It's way better than management with no technical skills whatsoever.

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