The Peter Principle is part of it, but it’s also kind of amazing just how out of touch so many business leaders are with their workers. I recently left a job where I’d been for several years; the company was smallish (a couple hundred), but had a couple layers of parent corporations that were each substantially larger. I’m not sure of the total headcount, but it was easily in the tens of thousands. My company and the parents had all been in business for at least 20 years, yet there was nothing in place, at any level, for career development or advancement. The most we had was a corporate subscription to Linkedin Learning. Job titles and descriptions were ad hoc and not formalized or standardized. Requests for promotions and raises were met with a shrug (whether the response was yes or no). Subsidiaries (like mine) all did similar work, yet there was virtually no sharing of information outside of formal co-dev relationships. It was as if everybody in charge of running the companies were clueless about what it took to make our products (IMO, most of them truly were clueless). And I actually thought the CEO was a pretty decent, reasonable, thoughtful guy - ya know, for someone who flies private. Most of my local management were good people, too. It’s worse when the bosses are jerks.