from Hacker News

The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly

by dalek2point3 on 5/1/18, 10:18 PM with 48 comments

• by wool_gather on 5/2/18, 12:16 PM

  The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's caused by bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance.

  One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it's how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, equally status-conferring, career track for them if they're really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.

  (The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)

• by kokey on 5/2/18, 12:51 PM

  I think in some countries, cultures and industries there's some kind of legacy class system where only people of the managerial class can share in the spoils of the company, so the only way to reward a competent and skilled employee with an income above a certain level is to make them a manager, while it's also assumed that's what the employee is also striving for. I see this in various engineering industries in developing countries, where in the same country no one thinks that a specialist surgeon can only be rewarded by being given the job of hospital manager.

• by erikbern on 5/2/18, 12:51 PM

  This is probably just a variant of Berkson's paradox, similar to Google's observation that success in programming competitions is negatively correlated with job performance: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-work-p...

  The mechanism would work this way: sales people exhibit multiple features, and they are promoted based on some combination of those. If a sales person has outstanding other credentials, they might be promoted despite poor sales percentile. Those other credentials might actually be better predictors of managerial experience. Conversely, many of the top sales people might have been promoted on the grounds that they were good sales people, without exhibiting any other skills.

  Note that there might still be a positive correlations between sales skills and managerial skills, but due to how the promotions are selected, you end up observing a negative correlation in the promoted group.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

• by empath75 on 5/2/18, 1:14 PM

  One of the nice things about agile (done well) is that there basically are no managers and the engineers have equal status to people like scrum masters and product owner. They don’t get to make every decision about everything but everyone is similarly constrained to mostly make decisions about what they understand best — the product owner sets requirements and priorities, the developers figure out how to make it happen, and the scrum master makes sure things are flowing along.

  At least where I am, there’s no management role I could go to that would make me happier or better paid.

• by yosito on 5/2/18, 2:03 PM

  My hypothesis is that salespeople do best without strong managers. So when a poor-performing salesperson becomes a manager, the sales team is forced to step up to the plate and give it their all because the manager isn't carrying the team. But when a high performing salesperson becomes a manager, the team rests on the manager's performance and individual effort decreases.

• by karma_fountain on 5/2/18, 1:30 PM

  I was a high performing software engineer who just got promoted to management and is currently Petering it up. Any tips on how become a competent Charlie?

• by regularfry on 5/2/18, 1:04 PM

  I can't read the actual paper, but from this summary it sounds like people who have just started doing one job aren't as immediately effective as people who've shown they're experienced and effective over time at a completely different job. That doesn't sound like a very controversial finding, nor does it tell you very much about their long-term prospects.

• by fulafel on 5/2/18, 12:33 PM

  The motivation, and reason for their perfomance, of some "high performing salespeople" might be to get out of the ditches and into a comfy management job. They might not be able to keep up such a pace for long, but consider it more of a sprint. In other words, the direction of causality might be inverted.

• by tofflos on 5/2/18, 2:30 PM

  Costly compared to what? Did anyone figure out what the article is comparing against?

• by chillingeffect on 5/2/18, 11:44 AM

  The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.

• by jgwynn2901 on 5/2/18, 4:32 PM

  The trouble I have is assuming that one can measure "managerial performance." Measuring worker performance is straightforward, after all, they do the work.

• by PunchTornado on 5/2/18, 2:44 PM

  Why assume that someone wants to be forever competent in his position?

  Many people just want to be mangers, even disregarding the salary. I would take a management job anytime even if my salary is reduced and even if I'm not competent enough.

  What do they think that I'll be productive in my current role forever? NO. I'm productive now so that I can be a manager someday.

• by rhapsodic on 5/2/18, 12:52 PM

  >Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy.

  What's an "IC"?

• by s2g on 5/2/18, 7:35 PM

  It's real, but I'm not a fan of the application in tech.

  You have junior people who are evaluated according to arbitrary metrics. So they try to put in a process and get a bunch of people to give feedback. So now you have these people getting evaluated according to arbitrary metrics in an overwrought process. You have overhead and barriers and all sorts of politics in place just to prevent a junior engineer getting promoted to mid level with slightly less experience. The impact to the company of doing that is negligible. The impact to the employee can be negative, but if they don't make that level fairly quickly they get fired anyway.

  I'd say the impact of that person giving up and quitting and getting the next level at another company is worse. Now you have lost someone you put years of effort into.

  I've seen this first hand. Surveys showing that a majority of engineers don't know what it takes to get to the next level, don't believe they can make the next level on their current team, frustration with promotion processes. Orgs arbitrarily deciding to ignore new guidelines because they think they are too easy. All because of a lack of transparency and a broken process, developed as a result of the dreaded peter principle.

  No different than shitty interviews powered by false negatives because "it's too costly to hire someone bad".