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Comment by TheGRS | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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 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.

Yeah, you can create reliable systems with unreliable components

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