[015a]

Its true, but I think the impact is what matters. Even a below average dev produces output; it may be substantially less than a great dev, it may not be of the highest quality, they may require more hands-on reviews and mentorship from other devs on the team, but its still producing output. In comparison, a bad manager can invert the productive output of a team or individuals on that team; high attrition rates, high quiet-quitting rates, prioritizing the wrong things, interrupting work such that little gets done, not playing defense, etc etc etc.

The "old" saying (well, I've heard it said a few times) is: bad software (probably) won't kill your business. There's a litany of examples to this effect. However, bad management will, with increasingly leveraged effects the further that bad management is from the line worker.

[t43562]

Bad developers write code that has a negative impact on team prouctivity. e.g. by insisting on a wildly overcomplicated implementation or writing poor tests and being aggressive to anyone that questions them, or being highly negative about some decision or other to the point where the team are not sure if that person is in charge or their manager is.

They can also pester everyone with mountains of trivia in PRs and refuse to change anything in their own and so on and on.

My own boss says "the main thing is to hire nice people - everything else can be improved" and that changed my perspective a lot. I think he's right.

A bad EM can do more damage of course. :-)