[kbenson]

> I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions.

A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.

The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

[thr0w__4w4y]

This isn't unique to Google; in fact, every serious tech company I've ever worked at or consulted with has this same policy. It's obvious and makes sense. Does it always work? Unfortunately, no...

[kbenson]

Sure, I didn't mean to imply it was, or that it necessarily always worked, it's just the example I have some limited experience with (or really, just hearing a first hand experience of).

I can imagine some downsides right now, such as employee burnout (since there's going to be some extra responsibilities as you attempt to do your old job and a new one at the same time), and the fact that this time perior, while somewhat long, may still not be nearly long enough to accurately gauge how a person will react in many common scenarios in the new position.