This brings to mind the story that begins with William Shockley's famous management and interpersonal skills. From Wikipedia:
Shockley attempted to lure some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs to his new lab, but none of them would join him. Instead, Shockley started scouring universities for the brightest graduates to build a company from scratch, one that would be run "his way".
"His way" could generally be summed up as "domineering and increasingly paranoid". In one famous incident, he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was the result of a malicious act and he demanded lie detector tests to find the culprit. (...)
(...) In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who called themselves "the Traitorous Eight," resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. Several of the eight met with Sherman Fairchild and described the situation, and the eight started Fairchild Semiconductor (...)
Over the following decade, problems at Fairchild resulted in people leaving to create new opportunities, resulting in the founding of (among other companies) Intel, AMD, and Kleiner Perkins--and I think everyone knows how the story goes from there.
So, I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Shockley, not only for his excellence in engineering, but also for his abysmal incompetence in management.
"... I had no government or financial aid, except unemployment from my last job. Went to try for a government grant, and they offered to help me spent six months "creating a business plan" I told them i had a plan, "Buy some wood, make guitars, put them on eBAy, sell them, buy more wood."
"They looked at me like i was a three headed Martian hillbilly. So, i bought some wood..."
Wow, I bet that would be the www.wishbass.com Wishnevsky -- I actually have one of his basses; alas, it's too neck-heavy for me to play comfortably. But then, it was a one-off prototype based on a crazy idea of mine (how about a bass guitar that you can bow?) Some day, I will buy one of his more "regular" basses.
that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence," but calls it his Dilbert Principle, that "in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work."
It's common to confuse the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle, but they are not the same. In fact, they are nearly opposite to one another, despite producing similar outcomes. The DP proposes that those who have shown themselves incompetent are promoted, either to get them out of the way or because the competent people are needed to do "actual work". The PP proposes that those who display competence in their current work will be promoted until they reach the point where they are no longer competent. Notice that the PP assumes that higher-level jobs are harder or require rarer skills, while the DP assumes the opposite.
I'm glad he hinted that there are a lot of people reverse telecommuting at their jobs. Even though companies usually try to stop this by monitoring their employees' desktop and network activity (which I think is wrong), it's nice to know people still do it.
As mentioned in PG's "What Business can learn from Open Source" essay, employees often want to build great things for the companies they work for. When companies squelch that by locking down their computers and networks and spying on employees (I understand the security and intellectual property motives of this), they sometimes inadvertently prevent such enterprising employees from helping them in this way.
Even if it doesn't look immediately relative to their jobs, working on a more-interesting side project brings new skills to the employer for free. It also revitalizes that employee toward their actual job. When the employee can no longer do this for themselves (and their employer), they get upset and leave, taking their increased abilities with them.
Eventually, they realize that pretty much anywhere they go, they'll encounter the same problems they just left. That's the cause of a lot of entrepreneurship.
Of course, a good manager could add more value than the people she manages. Engineers can fail to appreciate all the fuzzy unmeasurable people-stuff it takes to keep a big team communicating and working together.
Mediocre managers probably don't, which implies they should pay themselves less than they pay the engineers that report to them. Seems like a problem that's unlikely to be solved.
People become unproductive for many reasons, maybe they just didn't keep their skills current, maybe they are disillusioned, maybe they weren't ever that useful to start with and got the job by other means. But such people are impossible to fire under normal circumstances. So a good manager "promotes" them to some meaningless post to get them out of the way. Then that manager leaves or moves, and someone who doesn't know the score comes along and decides that hmm, maybe the VP of Paperclips could be reassigned to VP of Operations. And now we have an utter incompetent in a position of real power.
Engineers? What are you talking about? My dad's an engineer and he knew how to appreciate all the fuzzy unmeasurable people-stuff. He communicated with multiple departments and kept things running as smoothly as he could. He dealt with salespeople without going crazy too! The only value added by his bosses is that they gave him enough room to do the things.
Oh wait, you mean "engineers" as in "software engineers"...well then you're just continuing the stereotype of programmers being socially inept.
I'm a "software engineer". I said can to try to hint that sometimes someone who's an expert at one thing, who, unlike your dad, happens to not be an expert at a second thing, fails to appreciate the challenges of that second thing, and that general pattern can specifically cause an illusory case of the issue described by the OP.
"I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs.
...the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. ... a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history."
It is quite convincing that bad management pushes people to become entrepreneurs - but on the other hand if we had perfect management we would not need so many different enterprises.
Shockley attempted to lure some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs to his new lab, but none of them would join him. Instead, Shockley started scouring universities for the brightest graduates to build a company from scratch, one that would be run "his way".
"His way" could generally be summed up as "domineering and increasingly paranoid". In one famous incident, he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was the result of a malicious act and he demanded lie detector tests to find the culprit. (...)
(...) In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who called themselves "the Traitorous Eight," resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. Several of the eight met with Sherman Fairchild and described the situation, and the eight started Fairchild Semiconductor (...)
Over the following decade, problems at Fairchild resulted in people leaving to create new opportunities, resulting in the founding of (among other companies) Intel, AMD, and Kleiner Perkins--and I think everyone knows how the story goes from there.
So, I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Shockley, not only for his excellence in engineering, but also for his abysmal incompetence in management.