This is why this discussion is usually fruitless, it assumes a situation which never exists (this idea that people are hiring incompetent but nice devs over the reverse, or vice versa entirely). But what is a reality, is that without a competent manager, your entire team of variable competency is being set up for failure.
No, the reality is that there are many more incompetent nice people than competent jerks, and management is not the factor. My experience has been that despite the few jerks, 98% of the people on every team and every company are nice and well-intentioned. Then within the huge majority of nice people, there's always some who just don't move the ball forward, no matter the task put to them. And they sit on the same team with others who do get good (or great) work done. It's the manager who is now incompetent because some people can't ever get out of first gear?
> It's the manager who is now incompetent because some people can't ever get out of first gear?
Yes. Using your own words "no matter the task put to them". So who is in charge of assigning tasks? How does this person assign tasks? When tasks fail to hit deadlines due to incompetent members, what happens who handles that?
You're right that there are many more incompetent nice people in general, but management is the only factor.
Incompetent team members can learn and grow from their much more competent counterparts, but not when the manager is incompetent. The manager has to actively be aware of member strengths and weaknesses to know where to assign them for best maximizing their value to the company. Without this, even competent members will wind up burning out very quickly and leaving.
I agree that there's a ton of incompetent managers. The standard failure model for managers is not contributing anything of value. But I think you're way off base to say that management is the only factor that decides whether an engineer (we're talking about software, right?) is productive or not. Explain why a team has 5 awesome engineers who get a ton done, 8 who do just fine, and the one who everyone likes but everyone also knows they're not contributing much -- and they're all under the same manager.
I find the total lack of personal responsibility in discussions like this to be downright shocking. Again, I don't disagree that a manager can be useless, and even do active harm to a team and individuals (seen this many many times). But the notion that an individual who isn't pulling their weight, it's 100% the manager's fault... I fail to see how that could be remotely true as a general rule.
You forget management chooses who they work with, and chooses the parameters (like pay, perf, who is in the team to begin with, how the team is split ...).
You're complaining that a manager can't be held responsible for the consequences of the most important decisions they make. I don't agree.
I think you're overestimating how much control of those parameters managers usually have. The employee was often hired years before by someone else, etc. And it's not so easy to move people around between orgs -- say you have someone on your team who isn't doing great, but they might be good in a very different team... it's not trivial to just move them there. There might not be headcount over there, they might not actually need help, they may be concerned by the employee's current low performance and not want to risk it. There's a number of complications.
But, this was the statement I took issue with:
> management is the only factor
Managers should certainly be accountable for the actions they take or fail to take in 1) evaluating performance, 2) providing continuous and constructive guidance, 3) raising concerns if performance is poor, and 4) taking active steps to communicate and work with employee to improve if performance is poor. If you don't spot problems or ignore them, you're not doing your job as a manager.
But the original statement from parent comment was: The employee bears no responsibility, and it's the manager's fault if someone isn't delivering. ??
> But the original statement from parent comment was: The employee bears no responsibility, and it's the manager's fault if someone isn't delivering. ??
A lot of employees feels the problems that lead to them not delivering are completely outside their control. In the cases I've seen this, they're mostly right.
Some are outside problems, true, problems outside of work. But mostly, they either have bullshit jobs, or are being sabotaged.
So they don't feel very responsible. A lot of them tried feeling responsible, and doing something, but were punished for this. Most compensate by moving on, which can mean a new job, but mostly it means just stopping to care about their job.
