Control via emotional abuse. I've currently got a middle manager who is perhaps the most clueless person I have ever worked for (we gave him the nickname "Bumble" which is short for what we actually call him).
He has no leadership abilities, doesn't understand the tech, can't mentor us, can't pathfind for us and every vendor we deal with he has managed to upset.
To make up for all these shortcomings, he is manipulative and two faced, micro-managing to an extreme degree and generally when he does find something he half understands he's all over it (and you) to a degree that reduces your productivity to nothing.
Control is the aim. Everything is out of control, so the one thing he does have (seniority, the ear of upper management) he uses wilfully.
At one point this guy got an alert on one of the monitoring services, so he panicked and called customers, dragged in senior management and only after that started sending texts that I urgently had to look at it even though I had already dismissed the error as a minor fault in the monitor itself. I made the mistake of telling him to fuck off after the 6th text message in 2 minutes.
I, of course, got a formal warning from HR. He bumbles on regardless.
My last manager wasn't quite to this level, but close. The only way I protected myself from burnout was by realizing early enough that I was definitely going to get laid off, but that largely it was out of my hands, because my manager/director was mental. At one point I posted an Ask HN simply asking how can I tell my manager to back off in a way that doesn't get me fired, because he was so destructive. I'm lucky to have lost that job with my sanity intact. Lunatic.
After I did get laid off, he either blocked me very effectively, or exercised his EU right to be forgotten, because I can't find a public record of him. Although it would be funny to start shitposting his name around out of spite, since those would be the only records that show up.
Plenty of things: control, gain more authority at the expense of others, decrease someone’s value out of pure jealousy, have a scapegoat ready for when you make a mistake, create an opening where you can hire your buddies, satisfy your ego, etc.
Even aside from business incentives, there are plenty of people in the workplace who act cruelly due to prejudices, perceived threat, spite/vengeance, a need for control, perceived threat, general emotional unhealthiness, or just plain old personality disorders. Some end up as managers.
So you can ship your shitty product and get paid. That’s almost always the reason. Engineers have this annoying quality of asking prickly questions and many managers, or people in general, aren’t exactly thrilled by someone constantly questioning them or pointing out errors in their reasoning.
There’s other reasons sometimes. Control maybe. Maybe they have damage themselves and don’t realize what they are doing. But the big one I’d say is the desire to control the product release timeline.
Btw we all keep saying managers, but I’ve seen structures where the lead engineer is in this position of having personell controls along with technical control and it can be, and in my experience was, even worse.
