I thought this type of stuff only existed in movies. Just curious, can you elaborate at all? I'm wondering if I'm just blind to this stuff assuming everyone else is nose-to-the-grindstone all day too.
He got hired into a successful team with capable developers, all his "ideas" were failures or detrimental, he presented the outcome as success to the upper mgmt and they believed him. No soft skills, no technical skills, just presenting the overachievements of his reports as success and easy life for years. And lots of coffee.
He frequently completely bombards initiatives from within the team with bad faith arguments only to present them as his personal achievements a couple of months later.
When it comes to the areas where the manager is supposed to be useful, like cross team communication, all the work is done by the devs.
I theorize the prevalence depends on factors like how competitive the market is. In a highly competitive market, the organization can’t tolerate gross failure for very long without failing, so it either manages this kind of person out or does not survive.
I don't think that's the case (having spent several years in both the IC and management tracks).
An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy.
On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success.
There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation.
So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.
