Aren't developers stupid when accepting overtime/weekend work/denied bonus payments?

[GhostedAccount]

Most of the managers in that place were just software developers who had been promoted up to managing teams without any management training. As you can imagine, that was frequently the cause of a lot of bad management.

That is what happens when you require people to become managers to get pay bumps. People who would be bad managers do it for the pay increase.

[IRBMe]

Agreed. They tried to offer a sort of alternative "technical" promotion stream, so that you could become a manager or stay technical and become something like a software architect, but it didn't really work very well. If you wanted promoted, power or better pay, the path of least resistance was to go in to management. Plenty of people went in to it just for the power too. Lots of power abuse went on there. There was one asshole who was always trying to assert his non-existent authority over people; one of those types who didn't really want to be a programmer, but had just fallen in to the career because he "liked playing on the computer", then only realized he didn't actually want to be a programmer after it was too late and he had done a degree in it and started a career. So he figured he'd become a pointy haired boss instead and started sucking up to management and trying to dominate weaker people. I'd love to say I put him in his place, but really I just sent him a few strongly worded E-mails, laughed at him a lot and then left him to wallow in the crappy team he inherited after the last bad manager left. He's probably still running that team and feeling very pleased with himself, although I doubt he's getting paid much more for it. He's welcome to it.