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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the most surprising thing for me is that it is not only true at the entry level, but this is always true the higher you meet people in the hierarchy. Somehow I expected leaders to master their subjects, have grand long term visions or perfectly know the market/domain.

From what I can see, most people are trying to do their best but being a staff principal senior engineer does not necessarily you can answer everything (but usually they know who to ask or what to do to get an anwser)

It is not that people are incompetent, but you can't be an expert at everything.

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Someone once told me an old USSR joke that went something like this:

"What should a student know?" "Everything"

"What should a lab technician know?" "Almost the same as the student"

"What about a graduate?" "In which book is that thing that the student should know?"

"And the associate professor?" "Where is this book?"

"And the professor?" "Where is the associate professor?"

Thats how I see career levels in my company..

The higher someone is the less overall they know. I know regulars that I would put way higher than some of our experts. And its not only technical knowledge but also problem solving, attitude and craftsmanship.

Thats what happens when promotions are given based on "years worked" or "office politics" instead of work excellence.

Sad reality in a lot of companies in IT.

>work excellence

Promotions to new positions based on performance in the previous position don't always work out great either.

yep. you get promoted to your level of incompetence.

Assuming that people start from the bottom, are you saying that their skills dull over time, or they never had them in the first place?

I'd suggest their skillset changes as they grow into their new role. As they transition from writing code to people wrangling, the code skills stop being important and new ones take their place. Same with attitude, they have to transition to a new focus.

I know this is meant to show some level of not knowing stuff being somehow correlated to a rise in level, but couldn't it be an example of successful use of abstraction. For example, if a manager leads a group of 5 people with diverse expertise, you would need that manager to know 5x as many things as each employee if they're really expected to be as deep as each. It seems that it would be hard to find such people. A more accomplishable strategy would be to learn who knows what and what are the top level fundamentals of each field so that the right questions can be asked.

It's probably funny because it can cut both ways.

This reminds me of The Peter Principle, which basically says that people will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. Not to say that that are incompetent people, per se, but that if they are doing well in their current position, they will get promoted. They will continue to get promoted until they land in a position that is just a little out of their league, and that's where they'll stay. Eventually, an org is filled with people who are just a little over-their-head in almost every position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

The Peter Principle implies that the higher in the hierarchy you go the more difficult your duties are.

My take is that engineers between like 4 and 15 years experience and are not managers of some sort have the hardest duties. As a novice you get help or are not handed the really hard tasks and as senior you talk about the hard tasks or do some pre-study and leave the implementation as a exercise to someone else.

Promotions are more about having a ticket away from hard engineering tasks than engineering competence.

At the risk of creating more low-quality comment spam: I concur.

> It is not that people are incompetent, but you can't be an expert at everything.

Agree 100%.

I tell people who are speaking for the first time that it is likely they are among the top 1-3 experts in the room on their subject (unless it is super basic). This is because knowledge is so vast, and, in the tech industry, so ephemeral. (Some kinds of knowledge aren't ephemeral, but many kinds are subject to rapid evolution.)

> From what I can see, most people are trying to do their best but being a staff principal senior engineer does not necessarily [mean] you can answer everything

Yet this industry interviews them like they are expected to.

The working world judges more on what you cause to get done than what you do.

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