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Comment by spott | Hacker News Reader

The peters principle makes an assumption about the convexity of competency that I’ve never thought was great. Essentially someone could get promoted to their level of incompetence, when if they were promoted again they would actually get better at their job.

There is an implicit assumption that competence at job a is less than competence at a job b above job a, which isn’t necessarily true.

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I don’t think there is that implicit assumption. My understanding of the principle is that a person would never get “promoted again”, because their incompetence at their level prevents it.

Essentially: if you’re good at a job, you get promoted out of it. If you’re not good at a job, you don’t get promoted out of it. So the end state for everyone is that they remain in jobs they are not good at.

That’s brilliant …

Or a brilliant restatement if the original peter principle (to gives props eleswwhere :-)

So we just stop promotions … I think ???

Where i work the only way to get a noticeable jump in salary is promotion. I call this "horizontal scaling" of salaries. I believe the "vertical scaling" of salaries would be a better fit. Some already have it in tariffs, most of the time there are tough limits to what you can earn as "simple developer/project manager/sales clerk".

So yes, probably promotions are not the right action often, but the other options need to be improved.

edit: i lacked the explanation of vertical scaling: rising salary in the job you are currently doing and building expertise and experience. Opposed to being horizontally moved to a whole different job where your expertise is probably worse.

So people that are good at their jobs should be kept on the brink of promotion for as long as possible?

Promotion should not be into a different job.

If you're doing the same job after your promotion it's not really a promotion, it's just a pay rise with extra steps.

That's not a good recipe for retention of quality people.

Or simply pay them more without a promotion. That's what bonuses are for.

I'm personally of the opinion that promotion and pay rises should be entirely separate discussions and it should be both possible and normal to get one without the other. In fact you should have to work your new position for at least 6 month after a promotion before you can discuss any pay rise.

Ideally you should evaluate if a person will be good in the new position, where they will be promoted. Don't know if that's always possible, or how easy it is.

Also, maybe if someone is bad at their job, they should be demoted or otherwise moved. It's another way to break the convergence to people unfit to their positions.

Though, I have seen on more than one occasion someone promoted again and again after reaching their level of incompetance. This seems to be more driven by the incompetance of the person/people doing the promoting to cover their tracks though. They can't be seen as incompetant themselves, so they move the original incompetant employee up the ladder again, but to the side so they're less able to cause problems, but still look good.

It's often misunderstood, IMO. It's not purely about hierarchies and eventually "advancing" until you aren't talented enough to do the job (because the higher jobs are harder).

Lots of the Scott Adams types misunderstand it this way, because they have a "40 rules of power" perspective. It works better as like a law of nature and physics. Perhaps even better as a mathematic or logical rule (don't know the exact name, axium? law?). Could even be considered a paradox of sorts.

Think of it like this: Assuming an organization promotes people that excel at their jobs, but not if they are incompetent. Draw a flowchart. If someone succeeds what happens? If they fail what happens? (not clear, but it isn't really mentioned if the incompetent ones are fired).

Either way it's a guarantee under this system that all will be promoted to incompetence. You could even compare it to an ideal system like circuits. Yeah the real world doesn't work exactly like this, but it kinda can.

So, it's not about the above job being more challenging per se. You might just not have the right stuff. You could even add being accepted by the team or boss, because you can't be successful otherwise (though I dislike this one).

Actually, I tend to think it's the drive to "advance" that's the problem, and unwillingness to just pay senior people more (though there's often good reasons there too).

Sometimes I wonder if Stalin had the right idea. Purge the leadership every so often to start with a clean slate. Of course this only works with bureaucracies and not things that require tons of experience. You also have to have somewhere for them to move on to if you don't want to murder them or ship them to Siberia.

Was this strategy very successful?

Successful in what regard? Stalin ended up dying of natural causes, Russia and Ukraine transformed from a backwards agrarian economy to a despotic industrial economy, the Soviet Army took a good chunk of Europe during WWII, the Soviet Union became a superpower, and during his rule it could be argued that the Soviet bureaucracy was incredibly efficient. I don't actually think we should take Stalin as a role-model for how to run a government (I was being tongue-in-cheek in my above comment) but it is amazing what you can accomplish when you have a total disregard for human rights, all of the levers of the State, a ruthless secret police, and an enormous amount of natural resources.

Why doesn't anyone consider things like demotion, lateral motion or promotion contingent on an evaluation of fit for the target role? Must we jump directly to "never promote anyone" or "Stalin-type purges"? Are there really so few options?

people have too much pride for demotion - risk to the company too

Doubt anyone will see this, but the answer is simple: This causes people problems.

Chances are the employee is dependent on pay. Their lifestyle has likely inflated based on the increased resources. Their ego as well.

It's almost easier to just say: "This isn't done". Too often the result is infighting, tension, and/or the person just leaves. You may see it in niche cases where people just want to focus on their homelife, or clearly bit off more than they could chew.

In our current culture it probably is much better to just impede advancement and let inflation and technical progress do the work.

I think we can both agree this is a problem. It's actually a far deeper issue than people realize. We have a primary education -> professional education -> professional advancement pipeline.

We judge people based on their track record going through this system, unabated. So excessive hang-ups and temporary failures are off the table. Otherwise, you're going to get spit out of the pipeline. A reject. Now there are many assumptions and your professional value will go down.

Also, this is an enormous problem for people with disabilities or obligations in the household.

If you have something else, they will not be trying so hard.

Generally, to make people try hard you need either punishments for not working or some benefits. Skinner proposed a little more complex classifications: positive/negative punishment/reinforcement[1]. Positive when you react by bringing punishment or reinforcement, negative if you remove them. So four different kinds of operant conditioning. His findings are not directly applicable to human subjects, but they are not completely irrelevant either.

So if you are trying to fix Stalin's system towards more humanism,... I have two ideas:

1. Negative punishment: make lives of highly ranked bureaucrats miserable, with the "promotion" as the only way to stop their misery.

2. Positive reinforcement: make a promotion for them to be a dream of their lives.

I'd try (1), with (2) conditionally on their performance. This way you could get an endless stream of applicants to pick from, and they really-really would do their best to move to the last part of their life, even if they turned out to be incompetents.

The only problem is how to distinguish short term and long term successes.

PS. Please don't get it too seriously, I was carried away by the idea of good Stalin.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment_(psychology)

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