The Peter Principle still resonates | Hacker News Reader

The Peter Principle still resonates

cbc.ca

81 pointsempressplay75 comments

There's a sort of horror to this concept: you realize that everyone, including yourself, is doomed to incompetence. That every successful business you know of is run at a profit in spite of incompetence. Even more horrifying: Most experiences I've had in my professional career validates this premise. I can think of many projects I was a part of that seemed misguided at best, yet the company continued to succeed by momentum and great decisions that were made in the past (and sometimes decisions that were not even very consciously done).

When the stars align and things are successful, its time to celebrate, but maybe don't assume it'll always happen that way. Why this concept is also comforting is that you can kind of relax a bit on some level. I mean do your job of course and make sure things are running, but maybe this new initiative from the CEO isn't quite as important to the success of your company as they may make you believe.

This is great. I think there is a tendency to apply the Peter Principle to others (ie the boss), but it applies just as well to ourselves. How long until we are all promoted into incompetence, and how sure are we that it hasn't already happened?

The litmus I use to determine if I've been promoted to incompetence is whether my presence improves situations or not. There have been cases where I joined projects and didn't improve things or — unfortunately — made things worse.

All you can do is address the problem openly, find strategies to improve the situation, and try to find ways to remedy it.

If you can't, well, you've got to regress a bit and restore a role you're competent in. I think a common strategy is to try and shift blame or manipulate situations so it isn't obviously your incompetence that caused the problem. Many people might even do this without realizing it. I certainly did earlier in my career, but I never intended to lie or trick people. It was mostly the conflation of insecurities and imposter syndrome, along with my inability to ascertain my actual skill level. In self-defence I'd try to protect myself from the reality that I was doing a bad job.

The only way to get promoted without eventually reaching incompetence is to rinse and repeat that process, as far as I can tell.

I was once in a position that I was sure was above my competency. It was certainly above anything I had ever done before in terms of responsibility. It ended up working out well, I think because I knew I didn't know what I was doing so I asked for a lot of input from others and tried to do what seemed the most sensible after considering that.

The funny thing is, it was for a volunteer organization, not a paid job. I would not do it again, because (for me at least) it ended up being way more work than I thought it would be. But it was a valuable experience.

The incentives to stay in the position you aren't competent in are usually better pay, benefits, and perks. Hard to give up.

I find it hard yet possible because I know I’m unable to function well when I’m not outputting my best work. It weighs on me. My goal is to be the best part of a team I can be, because the goals of the team (rather than my personal goals) matter to me (otherwise I wouldn’t be on the team).

It’s a little dumb but also a good sustainability mechanism for my career more generally. If I was promoted to incompetence I think I’d have a bit of a crisis of imposter syndrome, purpose, and meaning, and wind up needing an expensive break or something. My employment references would be worse, my network lower quality. I’m loosely hypothesizing here, but that’s the general idea. I want to be able to go to work and feel like I’m doing the right stuff, and doing it well. If it takes longer to advance, that’s fine with me.

I've reversed my last promotion. It's not very hard to notice you are unfit to the task people expect from you.

Unfortunately every promotion that isn't a retroactive recognition that you've already been doing the new role for a while is going to be temporarily a promotion into incompetence. Each time you get promoted there should be new things you need to learn to be good at the new role, so you can't really be sure that a promotion won't work out until you've been struggling at it for a while.

>you realize that everyone, including yourself, is doomed to incompetence

Appreciate the perspective of applying this to one's self instead of only others.

I've often wondered if I can escape this or delay it by refusing management positions or other promotions beyond an IC role. Continue gaining efficiency and knowledge and striving to excel in a lower position I'm competent for.

Maybe the best hope is just delaying it. And even then you're probably just limiting yourself in other ways, which can lead to resentment.

You might potentially be a great manager and you'd never know it until you tried!

FWIW, this doesn't only happen with promotions to "management". Senior IC roles often come with new responsibilities, like influencing influencing technical direction, often without any "hard" power to do so. I've seen plenty of people struggle with the change in scope of their job. Some rise to it.

Or you could do what I did. Quit your job, found a startup, and be definitely incompetent at most of what you need to do.

Isn't the Peter Principle only true if you consider skillsets to be static? If you learn and grow into new roles, it can be avoided or mitigated.

i tell my kids, "get good at learning and you don't have to get good at any anything else".

I'd agree personally. My secret is that I've always considered myself incompetent, but I also have a growth mindset to improve, and so far its worked out for me. But I do meet people often who have a static mindset even in very skilled fields. Some air of "I did all my learning already, now its time to work, I deserve this position because I already did all that learning."

You are only doomed if you decide to play the promotion game. That isn't required.

> everyone, including yourself, is doomed to incompetence.

Welcome to the human condition. You are imperfect and will always lack perfect information.

> That every successful business you know of is run at a profit in spite of incompetence

That's just called "compromise." Those who are good at it are generally recognized as "good businessmen." Not because of their extreme competence but because of their willingness to accept these facts and remain positive and agile in the face of them.

> yet the company continued to succeed by momentum and great decisions that were made in the past

Well, precisely, skillful compromise can move mountains that otherwise would seem impossible.

> When the stars align and things are successful, its time to celebrate, but maybe don't assume it'll always happen that way.

It won't. And if it does it's likely due to your competition being absent or tardy, so, even if you do enjoy this once or twice in your career, it's certainly not going to last.

> but maybe this new initiative from the CEO isn't quite as important to the success of your company as they may make you believe.

Yea but they're going to pay you the same for the work anyways.

I used to tell people who asked how work was going that "I'm rising to my level of incompetence" (i.e. meaning I was still doing competent work). Most people got the joke but it got me the occasional odd look.

Yeah, you can create reliable systems with unreliable components

I take some solace by comparing it to what we've learned about the unfathomably complex nanobots and nano-swarms that are biological life: Lots of processes on many levels "work" because they each succeed just barely more often than they fail.

So still kinda existentially dark, but at least it isn't uniquely a human problem or fault.

I don't know about horror, but for me there was definitely a sort of peace that comes with this understanding. If you have imposter syndrome, you've spent your whole life wondering when everyone is going to figure out that you're a dipshit, and I think that finally understanding that it's dipshits all the way up is perhaps the only cure to imposter syndrome.

It doesn't with me, because it only made sense back when firms hired lots of young people and promoted the most competent. This isn't how most firms work nowadays.

I've never even worked at a place that does promotions. Sure if your boss leaves you can apply for their job but it'll be offered to externals as well and then you'll be compared to them as an external applicant, i.e. with resume + interview. Job performance doesn't matter, HR makes no effort to even measure performance beyond PIPing people who don't show up.

Weirdly when I mention this to colleagues, who know for a fact that's how things work here, they're surprised because they never noticed. Like everyone has a mental model of 'good workers get promoted' which is seemingly impervious to direct experience.

This matches my experience. I've been working 30 years, I've very rarely ever seen anyone get promoted. Also, I have never been promoted. But, 99% of this wasn't in FAANG companies. There is a "Promo culture" now that didn't exist before.

> Sure if your boss leaves you can apply for their job

I've never considered a move to management to be a promotion.

For the converse, work at someplace like a university. Open positions are advertised (because legally they have to be) but the vast majority are given to insiders. Qualifications are almost entirely who you know and who they know. I would guess many government organizations are similar.

I have seen this, but it's still never competence based.

I really don't see anything preventing someone who's been catastrophically incompetent at every job they've ever held becoming CEO or heading a department. This might explain why cognitive ability correlates much less with earnings judging by NLSY etc. than in the past.

Anyway it's very far removed from the Peter Principle.

As a counterexample, all of my bosses for the last ~10 years have been existing coworkers who accepted a promotion to Lead, and some of them moved further up the management ladder after that. Every external hire has been at least two levels above me.

My favorite part of this article:

> A 2009 study by Italian researchers offered a more radical approach to the Peter Principle problem. It found that companies may be better served by leaving things to chance and promoting people "at random."

The study they linked: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02195259185...

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. I also wouldn't be surprised if it led to better outcomes if that's how we chose political representatives. The way we do it now just seems to select for the most corrupt, greedy and manipulative, who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with personally and professionally.

This process is known as Sortition.

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

Goodness you read my mind. (Or rather, I should have read on first before commenting!)

Yes. The type of people who seek out political office are least fit for it, and should be deliberately excluded. We should use sortition, not elections. And if we are going to have elections, we should have limited fixed terms — career politicians are the worst.

Japan, with its rigid schedule for promotions, effectively does this. Westerners often laugh at Japanese companies privileging seniority over demonstrated ability, but maybe they're on to something.

Measuring ability is a lot more tricky and has more to do at times with your ability to manipulate optics. I'd understand it as more reliable and a gradual way to increase scope and responsibility. You'd only want to go faster if you want to chase money and promotions at a pace that is faster than normal, which may not be realistic in this market (or in normal market conditions generally).

> Measuring ability is a lot more tricky and has more to do ~~at times~~ with your ability to manipulate optics.

fixed it

Another way would be to narrow down to the top 2 candidates and then decide by a literal coin toss if they are equally worthy of the position.

Another relevant aspect of Japanese management is the enforcement of consensus decision-making, which blunts the influence of the highly competent and incompetent.

> Westerners often laugh at Japanese companies privileging seniority over demonstrated ability

Unions in west have traditionally been built around seniority as well.

Yes, but union seniority is about getting paid more to do the same (or less) work; not about being promoted into different jobs.

I recently suggested a similar approach to politics, in order to address the problem that the people who WANT to be leaders are often the most unsuitable (power-hungry corrupt sociopaths).

By electring a random person, the probability of this happening is minimized.

As a co-worker pointed out, the ancient Greeks had something like thats in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

My issue with the Peter Principle is the idea that each ‘level’ requires more competence… I think the issue is that the levels actually require completely different skills.

For example, being a good developer doesn’t mean you will be a good dev manager, but the reverse is also true… being a good dev manager doesn’t mean you would be a good developer.

If you only promote good devs into the role of dev manager, you aren’t getting the all the best dev managers.

I dont tvink your insight, that there are completely different skills at different levels, are at odds with the Peter principle at all.

The intro in the Wikipedia article even states:

> "employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another."

> If you only promote good devs into the role of dev manager, you aren’t getting the all the best dev managers.

You are literally describing the Peter Principle

And you're wasting all your best talent on management, because far too many orgs have a compensation ceiling on talent that can only be surpassed by moving into management.

I've made my peace with The Peter Principle. People can surprise you and can "rise to the occasion" — or in the case of employment, rise to the difficulties of the tasks or jobs you give them.

Not everyone can, but to deny someone that opportunity is perhaps ... cruel?

So we err on over-promotion — realizing our mistake only when it is too late. And I'm fine with that.

So you are OK with incompetent people occupying positions they should not have?

If we had a crystal ball to know beforehand, then of course not.

How can we know if someone will be incompetent in a role they have never been given the opportunity?

If an excellent contributor/leader wants to take on more responsibility, or are forced to because it’s the only way to get a nontrivial salary increase, it seems like that decision leaves middle management with the ultimatum: promote or lose the excellent team member.

I’m not the commenter you replied to, just my take. In some tech orgs they are barely starting to expand from Sr Engineer for ICs, many of previous cohorts were forced into management or hit a dead-end on comp

I am. Because by this logic no one save for a select few should ever be employed.

Personally I’d rather live in a world where people are doing the best they can and given room to fail then a rigid bureaucratic hegemony of ultra efficiency.

You don't need to be the best to be worth it. The ok ER doc still saves lives.

I'm presuming that "promoted to their level of incompetency" is phrased that way because it is humorous — but puts too fine a point on the incompetent part.

a lot of people are perfectly fine with it nowadays in the name of "equity", unfortunately

Yeah, me too. Nobody is born being a great manager. The only way to learn is to actually become a manager and actually do the job.

And you can tell if someone has potential. Like, a good manager needs to be a good communicator, well-organized and a good leader. These are skills you can notice if a person has before promoting them. Similarly going further up the hierarchy.

So what do we do when we realise it was a mistake to promote someone? Presumably they were competent at their previous level, so we need a way to demote someone without it being seen as shameful or embarrassing.

Perhaps "incompetent" isn't the best word for this?

People tend to get "promoted" when they outgrow their current role and need more challenges.

But eventually all will reach a point where they stop growing or grow content or complacent and the promotions will also come to a halt.

It doesn't necessary mean they are "incompetent" though. Just stopped growing bigger than their current role.

Also, I don't view the Peter Principle as necessarily bad. How do I know my peak level without going beyond it? And, without going beyond, how do I continue to grow? Will I eventually reach some level that I can't go beyond no matter how much effort I put in? I'm sure I will, but I haven't yet so keep going.

I read this article the other day about Morris Chang, the founder TSMC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559052

4-5 years before founding TSMC, he was forced resign from Texas Instruments after 20 years there and then got fired or pushed out from 2 other companies in a few short years.

He finally and unexpectedly hit the jackpot after this, but it could have ended a lot worse.

Growth rarely seems to be something linear or predictable. There can be lots of ups and downs, of things that seem like contractions and setbacks, instead of growth.

I work for a FANG level company and when a person is promoted to a higher position and it doesn't work out they'll get let go or moved back to another position, I've seen it happen multiple times and it's happened to me personally. This isn't their decision, higher ups demand performance.

This "principle" seems to ignore this completely: that employees are regularly evaluated for performance. I don't see that addressed at all in the telling of this story. Yearly performance reviews and KPIs are a thing for most professionals. When people underperform and performance is the norm the rest of the machine will correct.

I'm sure in more dysfunctional or institutionalized orgs are going to work differently, but it only takes a few empirical examples for me to just completely discount this as something to expect. I believe the research that proves this is likely flawed as well.

Omitted from these explanations is that promotions convey 2 things: increased salary and a higher position.

A good performer can be rewarded without giving a higher position, simply by increasing their wages.

The catch is of course that regularly an employee may earn more than his/her superior....

Perhaps relaxing the last requirement is too much to stomach?

Kind of ironic that this is on the cbc site. The CBC probably has the most people in any facility I can think of which everyone there is incompetent but stays for the pay and the fact they subscribe to the politics and the union of the place.

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The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270053 - Feb 2011 (2 comments)

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The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121507 - Feb 2010 (1 comment)

Dang's deja vu feeling was triggered correctly! No Peter in sight!

Let's give dang a promotion!

Here's a corrollary to the Peter Principle: Even if you avoid promotion your bosses will continue to heap more responsibility on you without raising your pay so that eventually you'll have more work than it is humanly possible to do and will by definition become functionally incompetent.

I think this principle likely does not include the public sector which like to promote to incompetence, and beyond; buzz lightyear style.

Unreal that we, as a society, allow this Anti-Peter bias to persist. It's 2025 — time to stamp out hate for good.

Instead of referencing the "Peter Principle", consider saying:

- I fucking hate my boss

- My boss is incompetent

- My boss can't do anything right

- My boss should be fired for incompetence

No need to bring "Peter" into it at all.

username checks out

Reminds me of:

"Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks."

-Michael Bolton in 'Office Space'

Also funny since the main character in Office Space is named "Peter." I now wonder if this character name is, itself, a reference to the Peter Principle. I wouldn't be surprised given that it was written by Mike Judge (same creator as HBO/Max 'Silicon Valley' years later).

It's actually embarrassing to Vancouver's organizational culture that this is where the Peter Principle was identified using case examples. In many ways, that prevailing set of attitudes that were identified as deeply problematic and inefficient have exploded into a city-wide culture problem. There are so many firms that just muddle along, it's a miracle they do as well as they do.

The upside is that small and efficient firms, grounded in meritocracy, can do a decent job competing with these companies (provided they can get any ins with vendors, clients, etc.)

I hate this principle. It bases itself on an appeal to nature. It is as if people are born with a hidden upper level of competence that they can never "rise above" while others were born "blessed to be CEO."

The worst part is that people frame it as an argument to avoid promoting. The truth is that people only reach their "level of incompetence" due to arrogance or just by giving up on putting in effort. I have never seen someone humble and curious underperforming for long.

I don't take that meaning from it. To me the message is just that in many cases, up is a stupid direction to go. The hierarchies we use to organize the world are a blindness to be overcome, not a set of goals to be pursued.

I, for one, will welcome our new AGI CEOs

The Peter Principle is an idea manufactured to suppress wages. The idea the you have to work at a level above your current level for a while until you are promoted only benefits employers.

I have only spent approximately 30 seconds thinking about this idea.

> The Peter Principle is an idea manufactured to suppress wages.

It's a satirical theory, not an applied practice.

It also presupposes the necessity of hierarchy.

It's descriptive, not prescriptive

Please spend another 30s. It can an interesting bit of philosophy about competence and ambition - and humility.

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