I also had one colleague who was brilliant and had strong opinions about the product, which were expensive and demanding, and was affected by a lay off wave. I think him being original, not "focusing on the core product", and a strong character had something to do with it, so of course it happens.

It can even be a bit amusing, if they are insulting about it, to watch them vigorous call themselves stupid for expressing their previous opinions.

I don't base my opinions on whether or not I get to contradict someone else. Clearly some people do.

I really just want to be heard. I want to be heard and have a response from someone who has comprehended my point of view and fully engaged with it, but that rarely happens.

At my last job I was defiant because the company was storing plain text passwords and PPI in the test database, and every developer had access to it (I'm certain there is a reader of this comment whose password I had access to along with a good amount of PPI). I said this should be fixed but nobody really engaged with what I was saying; we had important product enhancements to work on. So I got defiant and pushed really hard and burned some of my political capital, made myself appear a trouble maker in some people's minds, and in the end the PPI was removed from the test database. This caused the test environment to break and some tests needed to be fixed. They still store plain text passwords though, because that assumption was spread throughout the code. I would have continued pushing to do the work and stop using plain text passwords, but I was laid off.

If a company prioritizes profit over ethics you will find trouble makers who are justifiably defiant. Judge for yourself how many companies do that.

How is that ”speak in their defense"? Can you think of an alternative approach that would have delivered the result over time without you loosing your job?

I'm happy for you. I have also had such workplaces, healthy and dynamic organizations. Are they in the majority, or somewhere in the middle in a normal distribution? Not sure, but my guess is not.

It’s a bizarre environment and I cannot believe how much time I’ve spent in it.

It's also necessary to be able to accept that others have other opinions and that to make progress everybody needs to be pulling in the same direction. A decision must be made and most of the time it's not going to be exactly what you're convinced is the perfect direction. Yet, having said your piece and perhaps having influenced the direction, it's necessary to then support the final decision even if you don't precisely agree with it.

A large proportion of people with the qualities you describe are unable to do this, and therefore tend not to be highly regarded by management.

Of course if you consistently find yourself at odds with the eventual direction then you're better off being elsewhere.

It’s nice for everyone else if they’re all contentedly pulling in the wrong direction, not so much for the one that sees that direction for what it is.

Of course, any given instance may be right or wrong, but the balance of probability has shifted.

It’s especially egregious when you have literal years of experience with a subject and some person without any of that makes, or gets people to make decisions their way instead.

You absolutely have people who are very competent but just not interested in what management (rightly or wrongly) thinks should be the current priorities. Sometimes things advance to the point where there's no longer a good fit. Not necessarily anyone's fault but it may be time to part ways.

2/ there are either ways to reward than promote to a higher level in the management pyramid

Organizations where it exists tend to work much better than the ones where it doesn't.

I also have been in companies with two career paths: managerial and technical, both respected and rewarded, to the point you can be paid much higher than your boss if you are senior and performing. Might not work in every sector/size though.

This doesn't discredit what you say. It does, however, explain why it's much easier to move up on the management ladder vs the IC ladder.

On the flip side, the management ladder is more delivery focused (though not exclusively): are you getting your team to get their work done? It's somewhat easier to demonstrate success on the management side, and because you're leading a team, it's possible (though not necessarily true in most cases) for a manager to get promoted on the strength of their team and not their ability as a manager.

I think for every highly competent person who just lacks a bit of social graces and is unfairly punished by a defensive bureaucracy, I have encountered many more incompetent people who, due to Dunning-Kruger, don't recognize their own incompetence, and instead ascribe the rejection of their (mediocre) ideas to the unfair defensiveness of the bureaucracy above them.

Or, in meme form: https://imgflip.com/i/8ks5kq.

You are right of course, I am myself a living proof of that, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy organization to give me a promotion. That said, this doesn't really explain why so many incompetent people end up being promoted, which Peter (I believe correctly) documented. His theory is admittedly a bit more elaborate than mine, but it obviously builds on an endearing naïveté regarding the nature of organizations, especially large and mature such.

I have often run into people who seem to think management is stupid for not accepting their idea, which they then explain--and which I also think is a bad idea.

Maybe I'm also just dumb, though!

I consider myself one of these people (let's say above average competency). I don't think management is stupid for not accepting my ideas. I begin to have an issue when they disregard the concerns my idea was meant to address. Too often, it feels as though they choose the path which leads us straight into what I think are clearly foreseeable and avoidable problems, and then I'm at fault for describing them as such after the fact.

I kid of course. Or do I?

Fits the MacLeod/Gervais pyramid of losers / clueless / sociopaths.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

But once you start presenting to board rooms and people who have zero skin in the game of office politics, but 100% skin in the game of the firm’s profits (and more broadly firm profits at large), you absolutely will not succeed unless you are delivering value through competence

Competent individuals often question practices like these and are either coerced into submission or shown the door. This leads to a gradual subversion of the corporate culture, transforming what was once agile, resourceful, and, importantly, truthful into a culture of internal lies and self-deception. "Everyone lies on this report, so you must too. Everyone exaggerates their evaluations, so you must as well. Everyone inflates sales predictions by many multiples; you must do the same." Rewards given under the de-facto misaligned system favors the incompetent. This further estranges competence from leveling.

This sounds more like they aren't competent at the kind of politicking and development of political capital required for middle management.

In other words, someone competent is promoted and which they are incompetent at because they lack the skills necessary for the new job - the Peter Principle.

Ultimately both sides of this need to approach with humility and understand how little they can see and influence, and how all perception is subjective.

I had a boss who cut his teeth at one of the largest AEC firms in the US. He frequently said, "the two most dangerous people are an incompetent that everyone gets along with and the highly competent that nobody gets along with. Both can destroy an organization." I knew who he had in mind on the former, which I thought was pretty callous. I realized that he saw me as the latter after I was fired.

I think we should not infer rules about business behavior from market forces because management in large organizations have enough insulation to develop their own hard to explain customs.