Comment by OhMeadhbh
1 day ago
we used to say "employees don't quit jobs, they quit managers." i was very happy at Amazon until they moved me under a sub-optimal manager. i quit less than a month later. that manager got promoted. this will tell you everything you need to know about working at Amazon.
maybe they were trying to get me to quit. maybe that area's director was incompetent. maybe both.
Do managers ever get fired or fail? All of my worst managers seem to keep moving up the ladder from what I see on LinkedIn. I don't understand it.
Coming back to this with a late reply of more experiences, but it doesn't seem that unique for management from my perspective.
When I was an IC I dealt with a ton of software engineer peers who were pretty bad at their job and managed to stay in the field as a software engineer. I was constantly cleaning up or compensating for them. As a manager I've had to let someone go because they literally could not be demoted to a level commensurate with their abilities (there's nothing below junior, they must be able to perform commits of new work and couldn't despite months of training and support, and they refused an alternate career track in QA before being PIP'd), and yet... after a stint of unemployment that person failed upwards with an even higher engineering title at a new organization, bringing along an obviously lacking skill set and what had to be a pretty falsified resume and career experience discussion with said new employer.
The only complete exit from software engineering that I've witnessed was someone so bad at their job that they became perpetually unemployed and finally called it quits and left the industry after about 7 years of being fired or laid off back to back continuously.
The world's beginning to change but for a long time a verifiable title with the right number of years next to it would get you a long ways in the corporate software rat race.
Managers have to manage up and manage down. Lots of managers succeed in their careers by being good at managing up, despite being awful at managing down.
As a manager, yeah I’ve seen several of my peers wash out of the role for one reason or another. It happens. Usually it’s self selected though, disliking the inherent drama, having difficult to work with employees, moving up from engineering and realizing that was actually what they loved, etc.
But a bad people manager who still manages resources and timelines and expectations isn’t necessarily bad for business. Promoting them up into a more strategic role that deals less with managing a larger group of individuals directly isn’t necessarily a bad move either.
I've also seen bad "lower level" managers fail downward. But I think at some point on the manager totem-pole, you become this weird "invulnerable royalty," and always fail upward. You never see VPs get fired and move back down to 3rd-level managers. You never see SVPs get fired and move back down to being mere VPs. They always get fired and then move over to Dell or Intel or something at an even more senior level than they were at their previous company.