The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (2009) (opens in new tab)

Most people are probably not incentivized by promotions that give them a completely different task they might not even be good at, but by the increase in salary and status.

You can certainly have the latter kind without promoting e.g. the best programmers into mediocre managers.

The paper's suggestion to promote randomly or the worst is a bit silly. It only appears better than the alternative because they assume that there is no information about someone's competence at anything except their current job, and promoting someone is equivalent to firing them in favor of a fresh hire in their model.

> But promotion is one of the incentives to be best

Is that because many organizations tie together the concepts of higher pay/benefits and moving up in the managerial hierarchy?

Considering there is evidence that the Peter principle holds to a certain extent, that has always seemed odd to me. A person being best at one job is not a strong indicator that they'd be best at another. Personally, I have no desire to be promoted into roles that don't suit me.

There are two different sorts of promotion. The first is a promotion in rank, where the job you do is fundamentally the same, but you are paid more for it because you're better at it.

The second is a promotion in office, where the job you do is fundamentally different, but you are paid more for it because your responsibilities are wider.

We get in trouble when we try to use the same mechanism for both. Promotions as incentive in the first case are fine. Promotions in the second are what this paper deals with, and are where the incentive aspect is more problematic.

In theory, yes.

I’d love to see a randomized trial of random vs “skill” based promotions for people management.

I’ve worked in civil service environments where promotions were driven by core management skills like reading/writing ability, analytical ability, and various management topics. In other positions there’s evaluation of project management ability, and others were appointed to positions by political process.

Although I didn’t study it, observationally, I saw no correlation between method of promotion/appointment and my ranking of them as a leader/manager.

Depending on role, even low skilled people can be excellent depending on EQ and circumstances.

Exactly my thought too. There is one more missing element here other than competence, namely Performance. The performance at a particular level depends on how the agents perceives the promotions are made. If randomly promoted or worse, promoted even without best performance, there is no incentive for people to perform even if they have the best competence.

Moreover, there is a reason why worst performer in terms of competence is the worst. The performance of people under his leadership is pretty much guaranteed to go down, as they are forced to fight his bad ideas or adjust.

What is best? If I ignored all my coworkers I’d write a lot more code but it would be the wrong code.

Instead I work on a team and I act like it.

This is why horizontal movement is necessary in an organization. Also, changing to a management role should not be considered vertical movement in some cases.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. - Albert Einstein

How far up in the hierarchy do you have in mind? It's hard for me to believe that you could be a good senior engineer without having been a good junior engineer.

It's hard for me to think of an opposite to the Peter principle as formulated in the article:

"Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence"

Every new member moves down in the hierarchy? That doesn't happen in the real world.

It's a natural consequence of making the promote decision only available to higher ups, who have already found their level of incompetence.

Ideally this study would have included this effect too.

The Dilbert Principle: The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.

https://www.amazon.com/Dilbert-Principle-Cubicles-Eye-Manage...

Genetic mutation, evolution.

If I think that's likely to happen to me, why would I stay around to find out? In that situation I'm far more likely to apply for other jobs with my nice shiny job title while I've got it. Plus, with a mechanism like that, you'll see anyone with impostor syndrome (which would be... lots and lots of otherwise competent folk) making evacuation plans that really aren't needed.

There's a cult myth among even the "enlightened" rockstar companies that it's better to fire a person than demote them. Not sure why this holds root. Something to do with the idea of "trajectory" and that employees are paid and retained for their future potential performance, not their current performance.

It's really interesting just how rare those skills are, even at the top. Napoleon made 26 marshals of the empire, and only 3 would have been remotely capable of stepping into his shoes: Davout, Massena and Suchet. (Murat, Ney and Soult are all hype, don't @ me)

> Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

HN discussion (2009): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296