People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
This week we wanted to share an episode from our archives that's one of our most popular episodes, perhaps because it talks about a problem that many of us have had.
It's called why are there so many bad bosses?
I hope you enjoy it.
And if by chance you have already listened to this episode, do stick around to the end for a career update from this person.
My name's Katie Johnson and I'm a data scientist.
Johnson is 33 years old and lives in England.
She grew up near Bristol, went to university in Birmingham, and held a series of increasingly impressive jobs at a series of companies.
These were all what are known as IC jobs.
IC standing for individual contributor, which means.
What it is, someone who makes, as opposed to managing people who make.
Johnson loved being an IC.
She loved analyzing data and she was really good at her job.
But after a while, she thought it might be nice to become a boss.
Yeah, I wanted to manage more and more people.
And you wanted to manage more people because why?
You were just power hungry like the rest of us?
I think there's a couple of reasons.
So the first is that I wanted to start getting more autonomy over what I was working on.
I would be working on stuff in my IC role and I think this isn't the most important thing.