At my old company it was a bit of a joke, you would repeatedly see shit managers become "architect"s. Management were too cowardly to get rid of bad managers, so they were forced to promote them to get them out of their role. So managers who were shit technically constantly ended up with senior technical titles - and everyone knew why.
It's easy to paint bad managers as bad workers (or even bad people) - but sometimes, they're just bad at managing. In such cases, it's better to shift them into roles they're more suited for than to fire them and hire new people for those roles - existing employees already know the company's procedures and products. Plus, it'll likely be cheaper salary-wise - in our industry, new employees have a much better negotiating position than existing ones.
True, although in a few cases I've witnessed the bully without superpowers becoming a lapdog of some higher level boss, so essentially all he had to do was go crying mommy to the boss to have someone moved to other tasks or fired. Bad bosses need lapdogs.
This is very naive but more importantly, there are more than enough engineers out there that there's no need to risk creating a hostile workplace by employing bullies anywhere in your organisation.
I worked there 11 1/2 years, and by the way was not fired. However, I saw many people fired. There were probably many more placed on a Performance Improvement Plan who subsequently quit rather than get fired.
My evidence is all the coworkers I saw who didn't get fired.
To clarify: I mean in the rank and file software engineering. If you make legal's job hard or give the company a public black eye, that can be a short path to dismissal.
(It's a big company, so I wouldn't be surprised if, perhaps, it also varies from department to department. I have no idea if the YouTube piece and the ads piece have the same policies).
You'd have to compare the firing rate at Google to other large companies, and that would be very difficult data to gather. Particularly when "firing" can take the form of the manager telling someone "you might want to start looking for another job."
How can you possibly be a good architect if you're a bad manager?
Every skill of a good manager - having good working relationships and pleasant interpersonal relations, understanding conflicting needs from different teams, building trust, being able to schedule and prioritize work, etc. - is also a skill of a good architect. If you're off in a corner developing things by yourself, you're not an architect, you're an individual-contributor team of one (or if they're not getting implemented at all, you're just wasting the company's money). If you're actually designing architectures that other people will be following or implementing, you need to be able to work with people.
The balance of work is different, of course: for instance, architects will less often (but not never!) need to have difficult one-on-one conversations. I can understand someone preferring one role or the other, of course. I can't really understand how you can be a good architect, not just a mediocre one, if you're a bad manager, not just a mediocre one.
I think it’s pretty straightforward. When we’re young we often see friends, at our early jobs, who are good workers but get promoted and become mean + stop working as hard. Some people just aren’t good at managing other people but are still skilled at their trade.
I disagree. Your description of an architect sounds to me like an artifact of current workplace trends - which are to punt managerial duties and responsibilities to people as they get promoted, without giving them corresponding authority.
Architects should architect. There are some social skills requirement that come with any collaborative position within a company, but I see no reason why an architect should be expected to have managerial-level social skills, vs. senior-developer-level ones. There's nothing in the actual job of architecting software systems that requires it.
But to be explicit about my original point: managing is a completely different type of job than writing code or architecting systems. It's a whole specialty on its own. Not everyone has the necessary organizational and social skill set. It's learnable to a large degree, but that takes time. Just because someone sucks as a manager doesn't mean they're a bad employee or a bad human in general - it only means they don't have the specialized skills necessary for that particular role.
I think the difference is a good manager will be good at difficult one on one meetings with subordinates as part of their job on a regular basis. They’re good at the hard bits of soft squishy things with complex needs.
An architect may have the occasional difficult meeting with other stakeholders from time to time, but their regular role is not managing people.
Only because it is usually very hard to determine how the current projects will be affected if one gets rid of a particular manager. So the next level manager will always take the path of least resistance / least risk and move the person to a different role while having some smooth transition on projects. In reality, more often that not, this is completely unnecessary. But the person making the decision outweighs their project’s success more than the wastage of an unproductive employee. Basically a form of kicking that can down the road.
At this point I'd just leave. This is an employee market now. Promotions are made by changing jobs anyway. Be sure to leave the proper feedback when leaving (what are they gonna do, fire you?)
I’d hazard a guess if you ask at an interview if they have any bullies working there they’re either going to lie and / or you’re not going to get the job.
