Peter Principle states that an employee is promoted until they reach a level they are no longer good in. A person is usually promoted for their work in the previous role but find out that their skills are useless in the current role and start struggling. One surprising conclusion is that given enough time and enough levels, an org will be filled by people who cannot do justice to their role and the entire org suffers. How does this principle affect you?
peter principle is corporate nonsense with no backing and cheap way to deny promos
Why do you say that? I feel it is very true. Or do you call it BS because management uses it wrongly to deny promotions?
yes, it’s rarely used genuinely. youll see people stuck doing the role of the level above for a long time and still not get promo. not referring to me either but past coworkers who totally deserve the promo but it’s no where to be seen or maybe a cycle too late
In many companies, promotions are always lagging, that is you must demonstrate your ability to work at a higher level consistently before you are promoted.
Are we assuming an IC to Manager promotion? That’s a different path and I can see the Peter Principle making sense there. If the promotion is from junior to senior to staff IC then no, a promotion should only be granted if the employee has already been working at the promoted-level by finding projects that fit within the requirements. If done correctly there shouldn’t be a skill gap.
It is "infotech" artifact. Jobs and levels are much more structured outside of tech. No one will allow person operate a big machine without education, some kind of certification and apprenticeship. Infotech is very "fluid". And that mechanism (have to operate on a next level) is exactly the answer for both issues: peters principle and fluidity
I was the opposite, I was not the best IC by any means but as a manager I’m way more effective. I know high level everything and can understand why things matter and prioritize and happily give credit/promote my team and take care of all the political BS for them. But at any time in my career if you actually asked me to code it, I mean I wasn’t bad I never brought down production or anything but it wasn’t pretty or quick
Why not fix the political BS and fire yourself? It seems inefficiency for the company overall that should be solved first.
Sure and why don’t we just write the code well the first time and never have bugs or need to make any more product changes and then fire the developers and run it for 30 years? Doesn’t really work that way. There’s reasons why the politics exists. Some of it is healthy, sometimes it isn’t. People are often driven by their compensation and so executives and managers usually have their compensation aligned to goals that benefit the company. So they’ll push for what they think best does that. Is it perfect or the most efficient? No. But it’s the best system we have unfortunately. It’ll never be “solved” because there’s always going to be conflict between teams.
It's still a thing in outdated orgs but most modern orgs that have IC tracks vs Management tracks shouldn't really have this issue. If you go directly from designing software or selling products or being senior cashier to suddenly managing people with no transition or cross-disciplinary training in between, yeah ofc you're likely to suck in the new position. Management is technically a promotion but in reality it's an entirely different discipline with a unique set of skills.
It's a problem in separate tracks too because ultimately only one track has power over the other. So what that powerful track decides is the only thing that matters. But yes, less so a problem.
Google solved this by requiring you to do a job for a year before promoting you into that job.
Peter principle has 2 big flaws 1. It assumes everyone has a path forward and that there are enough slots above. 2. It assumes that everyone is chasing org chart upward mobility. With these assumptions, sure, everyone ends up at the level they are incompetent in. Check out if these assumptions are true at your company. Chat with a few people over beers and you'll find that a large number of people see through the futility and the BS of corporate ladders. Instead, they focus their lives on living. Sometimes on creating their own art, business, sporting endeavors etc. In other words, life is too short for BS games such as ladder climbing an arbitrary org chart.