Idiots in senior management

[onetimeonlyy]

I work in London in the tech industry. I use LinkedIn a lot for work and every week I see people I can only describe as morons get ever more senior positions.

Today's offering was a guy who spent 7 months going to conferences around the world and delivering nothing, has just got a senior position at Google. Spend 5 mins talking to him and you realise he is useless.

It's so demoralising when you work hard but see all of these people around you who haven't excelled at their jobs and they must be on bonkers money.

How do they do so well? And how can they honestly think they are going a good job?

being easygoing and positive (can-do attitude), means people like you on their side.

Yep, particularly the incompetent ostrich-type managers when the task is actually impossible in the way they are tackling it.

The worst ones are the ones who come out with the management buzzwords.

I love management meetings where I can sit and play "bullshit bingo", stops me falling asleep.

Oh that meaningless job title @MrsMaiselsMuff VP of Global Affairs and Comms at Facebook. Good God.

Shall we hazard a guess at what he does all day .......sits on a primary colour bean bag in jeans and a T Shirt drinking a Starbucks latte with Cleggy scribbled on the cup in Fakebook blue Sharpie.

Someone very close to me works at Facebook and he is always posting internally and flitting around the office

Our boss is an international speaker in her field. Gift of the gob indeed and a shedload of confidence. Flirting with the important people helps as well. And it is very true, make any decision but brazenly back it up with 'facts' and pretty charts. Create 'The Dream' for the boss and then blame the peasants below when they can't meet the unrealistic deadlines.

That’s how we got our current PM and POTUS isn’t it?

And they always get rid people who know their stuff and can expose them for their lies. And another one is they always bring their mate so they have a back up.

to offer solutions rather than criticisms

Oh yes, solutions - that crap. I've been around a long time and know my job inside out. I still can't do the impossible though. When, occasionally, I was expected to do the impossible, I used to escalate this to my manager. But she was no help - just turned it back on me. So I stopped bothering to raise any issues with her. This year, in my appraisal, both she and her boss praised my new "solutions-based" approach. I kept out of her hair and in return I was rewarded with ... sweet FA.

Are you sure they aren’t just great with managing shareholders? Perhaps there’s something you just don’t see that they do? Fundamentally you have workers and you have managers. Managers need to be adaptable with soft skills that apply across industries. They really don’t need to know or understand what the workers do beyond being willing to listen when workers come to them with problems or offer solutions and measure workers performance. It’s absurd to suggest that they should have specialist knowledge. If they had specialist knowledge you’d be out of a job.

One of our Directors was caught skimming serious money off client accounts. The company paid him 500k to go away quietly to avoid bad publicity. Anyone else would be in prison.

By managing the shareholders in my case this is the boss selling load of crap to the board. The whole technical team is laughig at his crap, because we have told him it is just impossible.

Years ago, I used to work in a specialised field for an international company.
One of my good mates performed same role for a direct competitor. She was promoted- brilliant at her job, very smart woman. She was promoted and again..suddenly she said she was doing almost nothing as a very senior manager for a huge multinational. Apparently what we did when doing the same job was a hundred times more demanding and challenging. As a senior manager, she just had to provide stats etc.
She resigned as she hated it,and the feeling of disconnect.

I recently worked for a very large family operated company (worth millions). So many of the managers were 'friends' of the family. I would not have trusted them to water my plants. They were the most incompetent bunch of employees I have ever encountered.

AllTheWhoresOfMalta so true. Though idiot is not the first word I use to describe the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip- that is underestimating how bad the worst Prime Minister of all time and the most immoral since David Lloyd George is.

I had a manger who said her team didn't know how to do their jobs(we did) she didn't see that as a reflection her you know her being manager.

We all got made redundant but she's still there somehow , every department she's been in has failed. I don't get why some people are so valuable but terrible.

heresme I had a manager like that who did this to a previous team. She was eventually made redundant though. Definitely had very strong narc tendencies

Yes!

YANBU my DH's boss has somehow got promoted after teetering on the edge of being managed out of the company

He's now is a more senior role, more responsibility, way more money and much more floating around the place including 'working from home' and coming out with cliched platitudes for his team