The Promotion Dilemma

Scenario

A tech company promotes its best individual-contributor engineer to engineering manager. Six months later, the team's velocity is down, the new manager is stressed and underperforming, and a key engineer on the team has quit. The company asks: what went wrong?

Question

Which explanation best captures the systemic failure here?

1. A.The engineer wasn't smart enough to be a manager
2. B.The team members were resistant to change
3. C.The company optimized locally (rewarding the best IC) without accounting for second-order effects
4. D.Management roles are always harder than IC roles