The Peter Principle (1974) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Peter Principle (1974) [video]

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103 pointsnyc11139 comments

Loved how humane his angle is. It's only a 5 minute summary, so I guess a lot is missing. He isn't ridiculing mediocrity or the sorry state of bloated bureaucracies, he seems genuinely concerned about the detrimental effects of being stuck in a rat race, of how individuals fall in this trap unknowingly. His thoughts lead him to think self-knowledge is the answer (but not in a blaming way). He isn't talking about better promotion cycles, or better hiring, or better employee evaluation. He puts much of the agency with the employee, not the institution. Not what I expected, I thought it'd be a lot more sarcastic and cynical.

We may have to revise this principle for the present era, since there are so many examples of people who continue to rise well past reaching their "level of incompetence".

Lol, it's a sliding scale.

More seriously though... there is clearly some truth to this kind of thing. Not to mention, fiat currency doesn't help since much of your worth is no longer measured by how competent you are but how much paper you can redirect.

Another truism seems to be Parkinson's Law where "work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion". (1)

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

I agree of its dangers and have witnessed Peters principle ; we have some promotion policies specifically designed to try to address it ; and fully agree that many people are paper pushers (not necessarily excluding myself).

But I fail to immediatelly see the causal line between fiat money and paper pushers. Are we saying paper pushers did not exist in gold times? That doesn't seem likely. And even if we put forward that there are a lot more bullshit jobs than before, productivity and Automation seem to intuitively account well for it. Can you help elaborate on the linkage?

This may sound pedantic but the cause is so simple it should be obvious: paper doesn't weigh as much. Therefore it's easier to push and so you get more "paper pushers" or "bullshit" jobs.

I guess the crazy part is, fundamentally, I'm being serious. If you need to dig into the ground to get your money, and can't just print more by pressing a button, human nature will make you less profligate.

Do you find that to be crazy? Unreasonable?

I still don't quite see it:

1. Paper money vs fiat money : most economies were fully paper money decades before switching to fiat. Fiat did not meaningfuy change the daily manipulation of money (and today we are largely digital).

2. Paper pushing vs money handling - I think paper pushing even in literal sense existed hundreds of years ago e.g. Various administrative tasks in the Ottoman empire, if not thousands years ago in Roman empire, let alone catholic church etc.

3. Value generation - you can still dig for gold today to obtain money; but long before fiat it was not primary method of value generation for superlative majority of population. In other words we handled paper money, pushed paper administratively (literally and figuratively), and mostly stopped digging for gold long before fiat.

I'm not sure why you think item #1 is relevant. Especially since you seem to be referring to modern economies. That said, there is certainly historic evidence that currency debasement has caused economies to fail, right?

As far as #2 is concerned, I don't contend that "paper pushing" or "busy/BS work" didn't exist in hard currency environments. What I'm suggesting is that the proportion of it increases with a fiat currency. Specifically because profligacy is normalized.

Perhaps if we compare the public sector size of individual countries with their debt/gdp we'll see a correlation?

And, to address #3, although a person can still dig for gold to get money... there's no obligation (law) that makes anyone accept it as payment. And, more importantly, you can't pay your taxes with it. Which means gold (or any other unofficial/alternative currency) has an inefficiency imposed on it by the state. So your final point seems incomplete and therefore inadequate in disputing the hypothesis.

Bear in mind, I'm not completely sure myself... it's mostly my intuition. Another reply contends that the root cause is over-financialization which, to me, is also fair. That'd imply fiat currency was merely an artifact. Determining attribution can certainly be challenging - as they say - correlation does not imply causality (-:

So, I'm just trying to think it through in a simple, constructive manner to explain the perceived anomalies like massive wealth disparity. Which, I'd guess has grown significantly since the start of civilization.

I assume you think there's always been a relatively constant amount of "paper pushing" or so called "bs/busy" work? What makes you say that? Or are you just assuming that's a base case? Is it plausible that in ancient times people could sit around and do nothing without suffering a quick death from the elements?

How can we explain the ever increasing pay/wealth gap if some people aren't accumulating wealth for doing less "work"? Did the variation in human ability increase over time? I guess that's a possibility. And I find that there's never a single cause when trying to explain complex phenomenon. Nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't think the causation goes from fiat money. That's a small technicality for most organisations. However, I do think the increased financialisation of the corporate world in general stands to blame quite a bit.

Finance, through accounting, is the original paper-pushing field. Some level of it is helpful, but it's very easy to invent busywork too, start requesting more metadata about the work of others, and create jobs that are fundamentally not about doing the thing, but just about observing the thing being done.

Not even observation in a particularly useful sense, but just because someone was curious what work looks like from this and that angle. And instead of actually doing the work to find out what it looks like from multiple angles, there's this whole hierarchy of people who just observe each other and get paid boatloads for it.

Indeed it seems to be inverted whereby the company is trying to break through the Peter principle threshold to where the employee is useful again.

More likely just professional ass kissers though.

I would put forward that does not repeal Peters principle at all - it just may not be obvious or agreeable what the job actually is and what does it mean to be competent at it.

Hasn't it been superseded by the Gervais Principle? https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Yes, by far! The Gervais Principle is brilliant and after reading it a lot falls into place. It also corroborates with Slava's experience https://www.spakhm.com/p/how-to-get-promoted

It’s a lot easier to rise well past your level of incompetence in the current culture of frequently switching jobs, since it’s a lot easier to interview at a new company into a job beyond your skills than to be promoted into such a role from within.

I’ve interviewed a shocking number of “senior engineers” with seemingly impressive CVs who nonetheless could barely pass fizzbuzz-level coding tests. One even called me out on it, saying he was “insulted” to be given a coding test with his 20 years of experience. Bet he got hired as a principal engineer at a place that wouldn’t deign to give coding tests to people claiming 20 years of “proven industry experience.” (Thank goodness our policy is to give coding tests to every single applicant, no matter how senior!)

my senior contractor was insulted when I insisted that he hang sheetrock, install a bathroom sink and wire an overhead light with two switches, in front of me, on video.. as an interview to lead a 2 story addition on my second home

You jest, but if I hired a spate of “senior” contractors who all had no idea how to hang sheetrock, I might start testing them for basic skills too.

a good percentage of ordinary males can hang sheetrock, or be taught to do so by on-the-job training in short order. That uninteresting skill is not required to be lead on a large, multi-part project either. The sheetrock job is physically hard, time-consuming and ultimately there is almost no difference in skill levels. In other words it is easily replaceable and not rare.

This reduction to "things I can understand, while I am watching" demonstrates the paternalism of a simpleton while wasting the time of valuable people.

Exactly. Hanging sheetrock is such an elementary construction skill [*] that if someone who purports to be a master contractor does not know how to do it, it is a good sign that they have completely lied about their experience. In order to be at the level of a master contractor, you certainly have hung a lot of sheetrock over the course of your life.

Likewise, it is so easy to do fizzbuzz that if someone who claims to be a senior developer cannot do it, it is a good sign that they have lied about their experience, and have wasted my valuable time I spent interviewing them. Thankfully, I managed to catch them before they could waste the even more valuable time of my team.

[*] at a basic level; mudding and taping sheetrock to a smooth surface is actually quite difficult

you have essentially admitted that you cannot tell the difference between someone lying about journeyman skills, and those who are not. Your solution is to resort to "do an entry level thing while I am watching" as a test for advanced skills.

If they can’t pass an entry level test, there’s no possible way they have any advanced skills. Once we’ve established that they have a pulse, then we can spend time discussing their more advanced accomplishments. Unfortunately, I can’t assume right off the bat that people with 20 years of experience can actually code; there are too many people who look good on paper and can talk a big game but don’t actually have any basic technical chops to back it up.

I am guessing that you are part of a C++ crew somehow, and that you are talking about advanced C++ and entry level C++, for a "senior" C++ production job. If that is true, it inserts multiple contextual restrictions that were not addressed in this exchange.

Secondly, a colleague in California, another twenty veteran coder (like me) told me that he recently took one of these interviews we are talking about, and his first reply to me was "It does seem designed to disadvantage senior coders" .. his words without prompting.

Tons of the context here (and verbal pugilism) is about the human interaction and not the skill set. You may be flooded with fakers, and I may have no time for being treated like a truant at the Principal's office.

The technical coding interview receives a lot of bitter complaints, but I’ve been both the failing interviewer and the failing interviewee, and despite the complaints it does wonders at filtering out BS’ers. If only we could reduce the false negative rate more, as I know I’ve interviewed many great candidates that just had an off day or don’t perform well under pressure in an interview setting.

I recall a story from the book about a fellow who "accidentally" parked his car in a big boss's parking spot once a month, specifically so he would not be promoted.

You mean the Dilbert Principle?

> companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow.

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

A good scene in 30 Rock is when Tracy is told about the Peter Principle and responds "but my incompetence knows no bounds!"

Employees can get a pay raise or a monthly extra bonus for doing an above average job, without being promoted. I have seen engineers making the same amount of money or even more than their managers.

But I recommend to ask the individual what he/she would prefer. Some really want the responsibility and are happy to help others doing a better job, and some others prefer to get regularly monetary recognition because they do a great job without a permanent pay raise.

I've heard of the principle before and generally believed it. But this summary leaves me with the feeling that the problem is mostly about people who lack managerial skills being promoted into managerial positions.

Is that the case, or is it just coincidence that his examples all relate to people being promoted into managerial positions?

It certainly can apply to ICs too. The scope and complexity of projects increases with seniority until they fall beyond the innate capacity of your brain.

As an extreme example, suppose the spectrum of software IC spans writing simple CRUD apps as a Junior Engineer to singlehandedly writing qemu and ffmpeg as an 10x Rockstar Ninja Principal Engineer. At some point most people (who aren’t Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack) will be promoted into a role where they simply can’t keep up intellectually.

What's the job position of Fabrice Bellard?

He appears to be co-founder and CTO of Amarisoft, which makes wireless telecom software [0].

Given that he’s posted telecom-related software to his personal website [1], I am sure that he is the sort of CTO who still also acts very much as an IC.

[0] https://www.amarisoft.com/about-us/

[1] https://bellard.org/lte/

What I've seen in practice, is a surprising number of people do turn down promotions to management.

Ahh so that explains why working with other managers is so god damn annoying

For years, I had assumed that the Peter Principle was named as such because it was alliterative, and because someone named Peter exemplified it. I had no idea a real Peter who had theorized it existed.

What was the software they used to make those goofy title graphics back in the day?

It is most likely hand animated dry transfer lettering. Populate a frame with text and use a moving sheet of paper to progressively reveal the letters. The color could be added in post processing. The more sophisticated "XOR" effect could be done with analog video processing.

The graphics (and sound!) remind me of the 1981 BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. The DVD release of the original BBS television series had a "making of" about the graphics, which were done using stop-motion photography of hand-made transparencies. I suspect these graphics were done the same way.

(If I could find that video online I'd link to it. I'm having no luck and I can't be bothered to go digging for the DVD...)

Boris Johnson is a fantastic example of the Peter principle.

I've gotta show my kids this, just for the music!

Something that makes me smile every time, "The incompetence Opera : Dunning-Kruger Effect meet the Peter Principle". It was for an Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGusIvpVxc

So when the accepted "Norm" was to stay with a company for their entire career, this was an issue. Changing jobs regularly solves it, wages just need to keep up. When wages stagnate, this is a systemic issue.

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