<“A-people hire A-people, B-people hire C-people”>
I didn't go into management because I didn't think circumstances were stable enough. I did see four co-workers go up the ladder, with disastrous results. Two of them I tried to warn, the other two would have been a waste of time to warn. By the time I retired, two had been fired, one drank himself into a coma, then passed away. The fourth is still working, but became so hated, the company keeps moving him to different posts. All four of these cases were promoted by management personnel who were "people persons", but were terrible decision makers.
There's an old saying, "Ain't nothing to it, if you're born to it." I know it's too simplistic, but it's based on a lot of reality.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking, if he is sure that work was the main driver then it sure must be horrible. That said, I trusted them since I am out of the loop.
After they’ve been promoted to their level of incompetence, they lean in very hard on relationships to survive.
Organizations where they get away with this are miserable to work for, and their influence ensures nothing merit-related ever happens again. Literally the source of the famous expression “A-people hire A-people, B-people hire C-people”.
I think the Peter Principle addresses a good point, but misses a critical one: the hierarchy itself. Obviously, a manager requires different skills than an engineer, so why should a good engineer be a good manager? This holds the other way round: a good manager is not particularly likely to be a good engineer.
Both is fine, these are just different jobs. However, the problem is that the manager is 'above' the engineer in the generally accepted hierarchy. Consequently, engineers are pressured to become managers for the development. As long as this hierarchy exists, the problem will exist.
A manager that is not as good as the engineer they are managing / wasn’t ab engineer, would be managing a team where the actual engineers are doing all the job and taking all the critical decisions. The manager would feel weak whenever the technical side of the work is being questioned, reviewed, planned, explored; they can only listen to the engineers, they’d have no say in most topics, weak arguments, will look lost. However, a manager who was previously an engineer that actually worked for years, and got exposed to many projects, will lead by excellence and can intervene in most subjects with high confidence. As for the managerial skills, one could learn them with time (ofc some of them are naturally given), but i’ve seen managers with very little soft skills, learn a lot, and do well.
“Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field. None of that is particularly hard, but there are a remarkable number of people who have never actually built anything that wasn’t a completely structured and pre-planned/pre proven product. If you’ve never had to figure out a “novel” solution to anything in your entire career, you are going to have a bad time managing engineers.
It works both ways though. Engineers can become enamored with making something novel, when what the customer actually wants is something else or already exists. Or maybe what the budget or market allows won't let the engineers make the best possible product so they're going to need to make something a bit less novel. A (good) manager will negotiate these issues.
That seems to go counter to the widely held idea of "innovate or die". If your company just wants to clone the market leader, what value are you to the customer? Management often wants "safe" so no fingers can be pointed at them. I consider that a failure in leadership.
There are different types of companies, and even within companies there are different levels of innovation needed depending on context. Take a current darling like Anthropic. Even though their main product is innovative, a lot of the nuts and bolts are source code adjacent tooling that is as old as the hills.
> Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field
I wish this was more common but every time I had a manager without an engineering background or one who was a weak engineer, the ride was not smooth to put it kindly.
How is the "engineering mindset" different from that of any other role requiring problem solving?
My experience has been that those who are too precious about the only role they've ever had (an "engineer") are difficult to manage precisely because of their inflexibility and lack of curiosity. It's ironic isn't it?
Checkout football/soccer. It acutally varies a lot, some of the best coaches were only "ok" players but some of the best players were horrible coaches.
It's not as absolute as you make it sound. Also because managing a team shouldn't require you to make very technical decisions. You should obviously know what you are managing but if there is a decision to be made, the people who spent hours on that subject will be your best experts and their guidance is essential.
In soccer coaches usually handle the strategic side of things and they have dedicated coaches who handle more player-related things. I think this is how a good manager in a normal company should work too. Make sure the team works as a team and take strategic decisions but not handle the nitty-gritty technical stuff.
My experience in a large ‘industry’ (not IT) is that we:
a) are very bad at knowing how to measure performance
b) mostly only measure performance as an individual contributor, and not as a manager or leader. (Which is to say: of course managers and leaders have their performance assessed, but it is often via the same tools/questions used for individual contributors, rather than specifically measuring skills in management or leadership domains)
Then you overlay this with human factors such as nepotism, conflict aversion, politics, friendships… and of course we screw it all up overall.
—-
So, to your point, absolutely we’re bad at selecting people who have the aptitude to be a good manager or leader for such roles, and terrible at weeding out people who aren’t suited.
This is a point I came to make. Different jobs also different skillsets. A good solution taken on by some industries is decoupling promotion and salary rises by having separate engineering and management streams where both have similar opportunities for career progression but you can stick to the actually job that you yourself are best suited for. People who have the people/social/political/organization/high-level-view skills and like exercising them can go into management, and those with focus/deep technical expertise/creative problem solving skills, can stay in engineering. People do usually have bits of both of these, but you know if you are stronger in one or the other.
> As long as this hierarchy exists, the problem will exist.
I would encourage you to try to setup a place where no hierarchy exists and see how it goes. In my experience people have wildly different opinions on multiple (even minor) things and without someone to "take a decision", things end up just going in circles.
Of course, if the person taking the decisions repeatedly takes decisions that have a negative longer term impact (much easier to asses on longer term than at the moment you have to take the decision), something should change, but that can include contributors looking for other companies ...
I've worked in teams where both Team Lead and Product Manager were peers to everyone else. Everybody reported to a manager above the team. They were some of the best performing teams in my career.
You put agreements/processes in place to make decisions in a flat hierarchy, and as last resort business (PM) makes the calls.
A manager requires very different skill sets from a low-level developer. However, for your senior developer, you need very similar skills as a manager. The manager can skip all the engineering skills, but the senior engineer cannot skip all the manager skills.
Senior engineers and above, they need to know all the engineering skills, but they are most of their time not being engineers, they're being a people person. They're talking to others, they're explaining to other developers what's going on, how to do their job. There is somewhat difference as the manager is thinking only about the organization structure and how good people are, whereas the senior engineer is thinking about how to use people to make the engineering parts better.
They are different jobs, but I think still being an engineering manager benefits from having spent time as an engineer, more than the other way around.
I have to somewhat disagree. Being an engineer makes you a better engineering manager. However, that puts a floor on how bad you could be. It doesn't put a ceiling on how good you could be. I've had great managers who never were engineers. However, the floor for managers who have never been engineers is lower than the floor for engineers who have been.
In my org, we have "tech manager" roles, where the compensation is similar to people manager roles. Some sr. tech managers end up with a direct report or two. At the end of the day, upper management asked and got the message that we care more about compensation than titles and implemented this in response. Everyone is encouraged to switch roles, but it feels like it's less about development per se and more about auditioning for upper management (both finding out who plays ball and has the skills).
I feel like I've been "Petered". Years of promotions for hard work, retention, and being genuinely valued over my peers; something which is not hard to do as a tech employee in non-tech big corpo.
Anyone have experience escaping this? Is the enlightened take to accept no interesting company will match your title, because ultimately it does exceed your capabilities, and focus on working somewhere that actually interests you with lower "status" and compensation?
It's just a fundamental reality of our entire socio-economic system that the people at the top do the least amount of work and get paid more.
If it makes you feel better, the tradeoff is that you're taking on more risk. Not only career-wise, but socially. Your fate is more intertwined with that of the system itself if you have a high status within that system.
This is especially true if you are petered.
On the flip side, we can look at Nazi Germany as an example of how competence can de-risk people from even total system collapse; some of the top Nazi engineers in the aftermath of WW2 were hired by the US government as part of Operation Paperclip.
It's easier to remember that in some organizations, it's about what you can do.
In others, it's about who you know.
But when it comes to internal promotions: it's a mix of both, and promoting people who are likely to boost your own career is an obvious choice.
When someone incompetent is promoted, people below them see their incompetence. However, the people above the promoter only see the promoter's incompetence.
I find the logic behind the principle itself buggy as it assumes that people will not improve in what they do. Even if one gets promoted close to his or her level of incompetence, it doesn’t mean that he can’t become more knowledgeable while making experience. That by the way is almost always the case, unless you reach your hard limit (eg QI or something), then you should not get further promoted (in theory). That reality is different and the system is somewhat “rigged”, that’s completely a different pair of sleeves.
Competence includes the competence to learn. If I’m promoted to a job that I can learn how to do, great, I’ll learn how to do it and then I can be promoted to the next job
Only when I’ve reached a position that I can’t learn to do, I will stop being promoted
In my mid twenties, almost twenty years ago, I was a very good developer. I was promoted into a management position. It was offered, I thought I wanted it. I did not. I was terrible at it, I wanted to spend my time building, not sitting in client meetings and managing other peoples interpersonal problems.
A year in I got the only negative review of my career, and knew I couldn't keep doing this. I was so stressed I developed trigeminal neuralgia. I had to leave. A friend was looking for developers and I jumped at the opportunity. It was technically a demotion but probably one of the best choices I've made in my life.
All these years later, I'd love to take a second crack at it. I am a lot more capable and mature and I think I could handle it better now. Combine that with not really enjoying the work now that everything is AI driven and it might be time to give it another shot.
> What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here.
I have no idea what this is saying. What does “being impostered” mean? As far as I know, “Imposter Syndrome” is all about personal insecurities. It’s not something imposed.
I think they agree with you about what “imposter syndrome” means, but think the shift from “imposter phenomenon” to “imposter syndrome” turned it from something that would be understood as imposed, to something that would be understood as personal. I have no idea about the history of the term, or whether their description is true or not. Just, I’m pretty sure that is what they are saying.
It's minutia they dug up that almost no one knows or cares about and they're using it to put their own spin on it for the sake of whatever argument they're making.
Ask them to explain how they expect syndrome to have displaced phenomenon when "imposter phenomenon" is practically non-existent in common usage and knowledge. If we can judge by the trend alone it would seem the reverse may become true.
Aren't most companies combating this by not allowing people to progress much inside a company for like the last 30 years? For my whole work life growth inside any company has been pretty much a joke and the only growth is by jumping around to a new company.
I have been promoted as an EM/Team Lead three times now. Every time I felt like an imposter to myself and the org and quit shortly after. I just stay IC now. No matter what others see in me. I learned that as an IC with 20% of management is my personal sweet spot. No more getting petered:)
I'm beginning to think in some companies even "staff" is a trap. It doesn't necessarily have to do with managing people, some roles and promotions come with a bunch of awkward responsibilities that effectively turn pleasant jobs into unpleasant ones, but unfortunately you're pushed into accepting promotions (which often seem harmless at the time).
After a few decades of working in a variety of positions, I've come to the conclusion that the "Peter Principle" is cute, pithy aphorism but not reflective of reality. The crux is that "competence" and promotion is not a one dimensional ladder where each promotion requires you to simply be more competent than in your previous position. While this is sometimes true, just as often, promotion means that you need to exercise different skills. Which you may or may not be able to do well (or learn rapidly enough).
For example, getting promoted to "senior developer" may mean higher expectations than just "developer". But you may also be expected to architect parts of systems, mentor more junior staff, provide guidance etc. Even more starkly, if you get promoted to something like "team lead" or a more managerial/executive level position, your need to be focus more on prioritization, managing people, etc. Very different skills than writing code.
Further down, the author wrote:
"The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm."
At which point, I have to admit, I said "WTF?" in my head. One could just as easily say the transformation into "syndrome" is rooted in a society that has shifted from focusing on actions and accountability to one that focuses ever more on inner-feelings as what is important.
Also, in my experience, people are already doing the thing before they get promoted to it. There's a continuum of skills. From developer to senior developer, you're not just one day developer with your heads down or writing code and the next day you're only architecting and mentoring others. You start out as a developer and if you're good at mentoring, people start to seek you out for questions and soon you become the mentor and you get promoted because you're already doing it in a small level and they want to reward you and encourage that. Similar for architecting the system, if you're a low level developer and thinking about architecture things you're already doing that work and you're reward it for it by giving more responsibility to do it more.
However, one thing to note is the senior level positions, the higher you go, the more you're a people person. A low-level developer can think about architecture all day long, but because they never talk to anyone about the ideas, discuss if it's really good or bad, understand the pros and cons of the ideas that others have, they're going to remain a low-level developer. This is why senior developers move in and out of management very often in a lot of companies. The jobs are not nearly as different as people would imagine. In both cases, you're more a people person than a technical person. It's just that as the senior developer, you still keep that developer hat on and write code, whereas as a manager, you're only a people person.
> The crux is that "competence" and promotion is not a one dimensional ladder where each promotion requires you to simply be more competent than in your previous position.
This doesn't contradict the Peter Principle, which doesn't imply you're increasing competence on a single axis.
In its most bare form, the principle states that people get promoted until they get stuck at a role in which they cannot adapt and do a bad job at. It never states it's a single dimension of competence or incremental over their last role.
The counterargument above is that people do not get promoted until they can’t do a good job at the new role - they only get the promotion once they’re good enough at their next position to get the promotion.
That's a good point. However, in my opinion, what you describe only happens sometimes; it's what companies claim they do, but very often they don't. I've seen too many times (embarrassingly, including myself on some occasions) people forcefully promoted to a role they are incompetent in. I've seen an extremely solid staff engineer get promoted to principal, riddled with bullshit responsibilities, given a bad performance review when he didn't meet them, and quitting as a result. It absolutely happens, and often.
An important element of the Peter Principle (the book) is that if you know that you have reached your upper competence limit in the organisation, you might have to take measures to prevent further promotion. Or in some cases (incompetence level achieved!) you might even have to engineer a way to drop back to your old job.
The book mentions the case of the guy who "accidentally" parked his car in the big boss's spot once a month or so, to forestall promotion.
A->A, B->C is also known as the Fibonacci law of hiring: 1st class people hire 1st class people (but may also hire 2nd class people), 2nd class people hire 3rd class people, etc.
I have to admit that while this principle makes intuitive sense, it seems to be assume that promotion and competence are so simply related. A few people are the "rock stars", but for most, in organizations I've been in, it seems like being promoted (or winning grants or otherwise getting power and money) is so competitive that it becomes its own sub-job requiring a lot of your bandwidth, thus probably reducing your competence.
In smaller companies (in germany) what I often observe is a combination of your latter point (it being its own sub-job thus reducing competence) and simply being in a company at the right time without any possibility of somebody challenging them.
I feel like actual competition is severely lacking leading to people not having an reward for success or consequence for failure.
Amusingly, the one example I’ve ever seen of someone quickly realising they’d been promoted into a role they weren’t capable of or suited to and choosing to leave it quickly as a result… was called Peter.
I don't know how accurate the description in TFA is, but it seems to me it's stating the petered employee, if they are self-aware enough to notice the corner they find themselves in, and desperate that their career is at stake, is more likely to turn to unethical paths in order to become valuable to the leadership. That's the connection.
My view of imposter syndrome is that it is often used as a cover used by actual imposters to self-soothe.
It's core to the functioning of our current system which promotes and rewards based on things other than merit. It's only natural that people who got stuff they didn't deserve would feel like imposters. The narrative of 'imposter syndrome' helps to persuade them that they aren't, that their feeling is normal and shared by 'all successful people'... Which is not entirely true but to the extent that it is true within certain groups of people, it is revealing. It does seem like there are large groups of imposters within our society who live in a parallel reality.
This idea is interesting to think about from an AI lense as well because AI can help hide incompetence a lot better.
> Imposters cloak themselves in a fog of obfuscation and busyness, so that the people around them can never say for sure what it is they are doing, or how well (or not) they are doing it.
Indeed, the more transparent a system is, the better it works toward its goals, since issues can be identified and fixed quickly. Of course, the nodes within the system that profit from obfuscation are determined to avoid real transparency across the network, as it would easily upend their parasitic game.
If we apply this to the global economy and society, we can see how billionaires, monopolistic companies, and other rent-seeking nodes wrap themselves in layers of obfuscation: PR, propaganda, media relations, politics, NDAs, patents.
They then use those obscured resources to maintain and expand their illegitimate resources further through methods like lobbying, politics, tax loopholes, specialized laws.
Therefore, transparency is fundamental for any operating system to stay healthy, distribute power evenly, and avoid succumbing to the exploitation of a few power-aggregating parasitic nodes.
It sounds like you're saying that someone else is making you (the receiver of the advice, not you, jrm4) feel incompetent. How are they doing so? Shifting the blame for their own incompetence? Trying to push work on you that really should be their work, but they can't do?
And, how would you detect this? By realizing that it shouldn't be your work? But that takes knowledge of how the organization should run that a person with imposter syndrome isn't likely to have. Even more, isn't likely to be confident that they have.
I am henceforth going to refer to toxic technobabble projects (e.g. "AI-all-the-things") as "Peter Projects."
It does help me understand why we've seen a wave of slimy shills rise up from the corporate detritus to lead impossible/meaningless projects that their co-workers despise.
I always thought that the peter principle is very flawed, in that it assumes an increasing level of competence required per job, and people whose qualities are static.
About the first, being manager is not inherently a more difficult job than being a senior IC. It's just a wildly different skillset.
About the second, reaching a position you can't do does not at all mean you'll never be able to do it. We learn.
The right insight there is that the switch to management as a necessary step to grow is horribly handled. But "leader as a profession" sucks as well, managers fundamentally ignorant of the kind of work they're managing.
I think what we need is a more fluid relationship between work and learning. We assume a college->work pipeline, when maybe we should have career stages at which we go back to further learning.
All of this is perfectly covered by the Peter principle. It doesn't assume an increase in difficulty at all, it just assumes a different skillset. People are promoted (maybe to manager) based on their performance in their previous job (maybe programmer). If they can adapt, great, and maybe they are even promoted further. If they cannot, they have reached their level of incompetence.
Why would going back to college help here? You don't need more certification you're already in and proved your value. As an outside and self taught I've always been fascinated. For a subset of people is it actually learn better in college style environments than on their own?
I'm not talking necessarily about college, I'm talking about getting proper learning space when the new job is significantly different, which is the point of the discussion.
I personally like self learning, but I've met way too many cases of managers that were great engineers and awful at people management. At the end of the day the truth is nobody explicitly taught them the new required skills.
We shouldn't base the system on their first reports being guinea pigs while the manager wings it.
In most (all?) jobs, you can’t make more $ in the same role outside of inflation adjustments. You want more, you need to move up or hop. Moving up separates one from what they were good at, and enjoyed. All of a sudden you are dealing with vacation requests and some HR portal.
This feels to me like a stretch. Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf studied data from the Argentinian army and compared it with historical accounts of dictatorships and coups, tracing differences between henchmen, coup plotters, and other members of the officer corps. These are situations where your physical survival often depends on what you do.
That's very different from company environments.
The Peter Principle is also unfortunately an overly simplistic model. Yes, some people can get promoted to a level where they technically can't cope anymore, but ability is rarely the measure by which people advance (except at the lowest grades where your political power is almost nil).
Note that the Peter Principle came long before the Gervais Principle. It might be more true to say that the Gervais Principle is largely a restatement of the Peter Principle.
I think they are related but focus on different things. The Gervais principle talks of losers, clueless and sociopaths (with a focus on the latter), not something the Peter Principle deals with. I'd say the Peter Principle deals mostly with what the Gervais Principle calls "the clueless".
There's plenty of stuff that goes on in large organisations which sits in what I would call "minor illegality" i.e. technically illegal, but the sort of thing people are going to pretend not to notice as long as they can have plausible deniability themselves.
> What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here. What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?
This seemed always baffling if someone openly "confessed" suffering from the imposter syndrome.
It is like calling yourself a "skeptic" and taking joy in dismantling other people's beliefs, yet reacting with extreme sensitivity the moment your own convictions are touched upon.
Or if you were really paranoid, you would be unsure of everything (even of your paranoid state) so you wouldn't just confidently drop that label in conversation doing so usually serves as a polite excuse for being a "control freak" which in turn serves as an excuse for something else and so on.
In a broader sense this touches upon a deeper cultural issues around appearances and self-identification. In (a lot of) different cultures one rarely talks about an internal state in an abstract, systematic almost clinical manner instead a wide breadth of colorful almost childlike language is used to describe rising and ebbing feelings while at the same time one's actions are observed very diligently and somehow quietly tallied over time.
Under those circumstances, you can bluff, obfuscate or outright lie and it matters very little so long as your actions are deemed good conversely if you present yourself as genuine, "authentic," and vulnerable while your actual deeds are horrible: out you go. So overall there is less "flexibility" and more "accountability".
It's a good story, but not a rigorous study. I believe at least one of the authors was in Academia so the idea may apply more in that industry. Also, someone told me that the author worked at WSU and applies more particularly there.
<“A-people hire A-people, B-people hire C-people”>
I didn't go into management because I didn't think circumstances were stable enough. I did see four co-workers go up the ladder, with disastrous results. Two of them I tried to warn, the other two would have been a waste of time to warn. By the time I retired, two had been fired, one drank himself into a coma, then passed away. The fourth is still working, but became so hated, the company keeps moving him to different posts. All four of these cases were promoted by management personnel who were "people persons", but were terrible decision makers.
There's an old saying, "Ain't nothing to it, if you're born to it." I know it's too simplistic, but it's based on a lot of reality.
Damn this sounds like an extremely unhealthy environment in general.
I experienced burnout before but dying because of work sounds very extreme.
"I had a friend who went into management. He died!" "Dad, are all of your friends dead?"
OP makes some big assumptions that is was because of work and not many reasons (even if work was one of them).
Yeah that’s what I was thinking, if he is sure that work was the main driver then it sure must be horrible. That said, I trusted them since I am out of the loop.
We don't have enough information to know whether or not OP is making assumptions, and therefore would be wrong to assume so.
OP could have been friends with or a friend of a friend or could have hardly met the coworker. We don't know.
After they’ve been promoted to their level of incompetence, they lean in very hard on relationships to survive.
Organizations where they get away with this are miserable to work for, and their influence ensures nothing merit-related ever happens again. Literally the source of the famous expression “A-people hire A-people, B-people hire C-people”.
I never thought of that quote was something connected to management. What makes you think that?
Here is it straight from the source: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_recr-2/
It seems straightforwardly about management decisions to me given that it’s about who to hire.
What’s your interpretation? What do you connect it to, if not management?
I think the Peter Principle addresses a good point, but misses a critical one: the hierarchy itself. Obviously, a manager requires different skills than an engineer, so why should a good engineer be a good manager? This holds the other way round: a good manager is not particularly likely to be a good engineer.
Both is fine, these are just different jobs. However, the problem is that the manager is 'above' the engineer in the generally accepted hierarchy. Consequently, engineers are pressured to become managers for the development. As long as this hierarchy exists, the problem will exist.
A manager that is not as good as the engineer they are managing / wasn’t ab engineer, would be managing a team where the actual engineers are doing all the job and taking all the critical decisions. The manager would feel weak whenever the technical side of the work is being questioned, reviewed, planned, explored; they can only listen to the engineers, they’d have no say in most topics, weak arguments, will look lost. However, a manager who was previously an engineer that actually worked for years, and got exposed to many projects, will lead by excellence and can intervene in most subjects with high confidence. As for the managerial skills, one could learn them with time (ofc some of them are naturally given), but i’ve seen managers with very little soft skills, learn a lot, and do well.
“Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field. None of that is particularly hard, but there are a remarkable number of people who have never actually built anything that wasn’t a completely structured and pre-planned/pre proven product. If you’ve never had to figure out a “novel” solution to anything in your entire career, you are going to have a bad time managing engineers.
It works both ways though. Engineers can become enamored with making something novel, when what the customer actually wants is something else or already exists. Or maybe what the budget or market allows won't let the engineers make the best possible product so they're going to need to make something a bit less novel. A (good) manager will negotiate these issues.
That seems to go counter to the widely held idea of "innovate or die". If your company just wants to clone the market leader, what value are you to the customer? Management often wants "safe" so no fingers can be pointed at them. I consider that a failure in leadership.
There are different types of companies, and even within companies there are different levels of innovation needed depending on context. Take a current darling like Anthropic. Even though their main product is innovative, a lot of the nuts and bolts are source code adjacent tooling that is as old as the hills.
> Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field
I wish this was more common but every time I had a manager without an engineering background or one who was a weak engineer, the ride was not smooth to put it kindly.
At a minimum managers need to understand the basics of software: code debts, release cycles, team workflows, infra basics, security, etc.
They don't need to be software engineers but they should have an overview of the industry.
How is the "engineering mindset" different from that of any other role requiring problem solving?
My experience has been that those who are too precious about the only role they've ever had (an "engineer") are difficult to manage precisely because of their inflexibility and lack of curiosity. It's ironic isn't it?
Checkout football/soccer. It acutally varies a lot, some of the best coaches were only "ok" players but some of the best players were horrible coaches.
It's not as absolute as you make it sound. Also because managing a team shouldn't require you to make very technical decisions. You should obviously know what you are managing but if there is a decision to be made, the people who spent hours on that subject will be your best experts and their guidance is essential.
In soccer coaches usually handle the strategic side of things and they have dedicated coaches who handle more player-related things. I think this is how a good manager in a normal company should work too. Make sure the team works as a team and take strategic decisions but not handle the nitty-gritty technical stuff.
My experience in a large ‘industry’ (not IT) is that we: a) are very bad at knowing how to measure performance b) mostly only measure performance as an individual contributor, and not as a manager or leader. (Which is to say: of course managers and leaders have their performance assessed, but it is often via the same tools/questions used for individual contributors, rather than specifically measuring skills in management or leadership domains) Then you overlay this with human factors such as nepotism, conflict aversion, politics, friendships… and of course we screw it all up overall. —- So, to your point, absolutely we’re bad at selecting people who have the aptitude to be a good manager or leader for such roles, and terrible at weeding out people who aren’t suited.
> these are just different jobs
This is a point I came to make. Different jobs also different skillsets. A good solution taken on by some industries is decoupling promotion and salary rises by having separate engineering and management streams where both have similar opportunities for career progression but you can stick to the actually job that you yourself are best suited for. People who have the people/social/political/organization/high-level-view skills and like exercising them can go into management, and those with focus/deep technical expertise/creative problem solving skills, can stay in engineering. People do usually have bits of both of these, but you know if you are stronger in one or the other.
> As long as this hierarchy exists, the problem will exist.
I would encourage you to try to setup a place where no hierarchy exists and see how it goes. In my experience people have wildly different opinions on multiple (even minor) things and without someone to "take a decision", things end up just going in circles.
Of course, if the person taking the decisions repeatedly takes decisions that have a negative longer term impact (much easier to asses on longer term than at the moment you have to take the decision), something should change, but that can include contributors looking for other companies ...
I've worked in teams where both Team Lead and Product Manager were peers to everyone else. Everybody reported to a manager above the team. They were some of the best performing teams in my career.
You put agreements/processes in place to make decisions in a flat hierarchy, and as last resort business (PM) makes the calls.
A manager requires very different skill sets from a low-level developer. However, for your senior developer, you need very similar skills as a manager. The manager can skip all the engineering skills, but the senior engineer cannot skip all the manager skills.
Senior engineers and above, they need to know all the engineering skills, but they are most of their time not being engineers, they're being a people person. They're talking to others, they're explaining to other developers what's going on, how to do their job. There is somewhat difference as the manager is thinking only about the organization structure and how good people are, whereas the senior engineer is thinking about how to use people to make the engineering parts better.
They are different jobs, but I think still being an engineering manager benefits from having spent time as an engineer, more than the other way around.
I have to somewhat disagree. Being an engineer makes you a better engineering manager. However, that puts a floor on how bad you could be. It doesn't put a ceiling on how good you could be. I've had great managers who never were engineers. However, the floor for managers who have never been engineers is lower than the floor for engineers who have been.
In my org, we have "tech manager" roles, where the compensation is similar to people manager roles. Some sr. tech managers end up with a direct report or two. At the end of the day, upper management asked and got the message that we care more about compensation than titles and implemented this in response. Everyone is encouraged to switch roles, but it feels like it's less about development per se and more about auditioning for upper management (both finding out who plays ball and has the skills).
I feel like I've been "Petered". Years of promotions for hard work, retention, and being genuinely valued over my peers; something which is not hard to do as a tech employee in non-tech big corpo.
Anyone have experience escaping this? Is the enlightened take to accept no interesting company will match your title, because ultimately it does exceed your capabilities, and focus on working somewhere that actually interests you with lower "status" and compensation?
It's just a fundamental reality of our entire socio-economic system that the people at the top do the least amount of work and get paid more.
If it makes you feel better, the tradeoff is that you're taking on more risk. Not only career-wise, but socially. Your fate is more intertwined with that of the system itself if you have a high status within that system.
This is especially true if you are petered.
On the flip side, we can look at Nazi Germany as an example of how competence can de-risk people from even total system collapse; some of the top Nazi engineers in the aftermath of WW2 were hired by the US government as part of Operation Paperclip.
It's easier to remember that in some organizations, it's about what you can do.
In others, it's about who you know.
But when it comes to internal promotions: it's a mix of both, and promoting people who are likely to boost your own career is an obvious choice.
When someone incompetent is promoted, people below them see their incompetence. However, the people above the promoter only see the promoter's incompetence.
I find the logic behind the principle itself buggy as it assumes that people will not improve in what they do. Even if one gets promoted close to his or her level of incompetence, it doesn’t mean that he can’t become more knowledgeable while making experience. That by the way is almost always the case, unless you reach your hard limit (eg QI or something), then you should not get further promoted (in theory). That reality is different and the system is somewhat “rigged”, that’s completely a different pair of sleeves.
Competence includes the competence to learn. If I’m promoted to a job that I can learn how to do, great, I’ll learn how to do it and then I can be promoted to the next job
Only when I’ve reached a position that I can’t learn to do, I will stop being promoted
There is a lot more consideration that goes into promotion.
Competency is about you, but it's also about the competitiveness of the organization.
Not every business has the ability to promote to satisfy everyone's ambition.
The problem is when promotions don't just bring on more challenging work, but include lateral responsibility
In my mid twenties, almost twenty years ago, I was a very good developer. I was promoted into a management position. It was offered, I thought I wanted it. I did not. I was terrible at it, I wanted to spend my time building, not sitting in client meetings and managing other peoples interpersonal problems.
A year in I got the only negative review of my career, and knew I couldn't keep doing this. I was so stressed I developed trigeminal neuralgia. I had to leave. A friend was looking for developers and I jumped at the opportunity. It was technically a demotion but probably one of the best choices I've made in my life.
All these years later, I'd love to take a second crack at it. I am a lot more capable and mature and I think I could handle it better now. Combine that with not really enjoying the work now that everything is AI driven and it might be time to give it another shot.
> What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here.
I have no idea what this is saying. What does “being impostered” mean? As far as I know, “Imposter Syndrome” is all about personal insecurities. It’s not something imposed.
I think they agree with you about what “imposter syndrome” means, but think the shift from “imposter phenomenon” to “imposter syndrome” turned it from something that would be understood as imposed, to something that would be understood as personal. I have no idea about the history of the term, or whether their description is true or not. Just, I’m pretty sure that is what they are saying.
It's minutia they dug up that almost no one knows or cares about and they're using it to put their own spin on it for the sake of whatever argument they're making.
Ask them to explain how they expect syndrome to have displaced phenomenon when "imposter phenomenon" is practically non-existent in common usage and knowledge. If we can judge by the trend alone it would seem the reverse may become true.
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=imposter%2520syndrome%2C...
Aren't most companies combating this by not allowing people to progress much inside a company for like the last 30 years? For my whole work life growth inside any company has been pretty much a joke and the only growth is by jumping around to a new company.
I have been promoted as an EM/Team Lead three times now. Every time I felt like an imposter to myself and the org and quit shortly after. I just stay IC now. No matter what others see in me. I learned that as an IC with 20% of management is my personal sweet spot. No more getting petered:)
I'm beginning to think in some companies even "staff" is a trap. It doesn't necessarily have to do with managing people, some roles and promotions come with a bunch of awkward responsibilities that effectively turn pleasant jobs into unpleasant ones, but unfortunately you're pushed into accepting promotions (which often seem harmless at the time).
After a few decades of working in a variety of positions, I've come to the conclusion that the "Peter Principle" is cute, pithy aphorism but not reflective of reality. The crux is that "competence" and promotion is not a one dimensional ladder where each promotion requires you to simply be more competent than in your previous position. While this is sometimes true, just as often, promotion means that you need to exercise different skills. Which you may or may not be able to do well (or learn rapidly enough).
For example, getting promoted to "senior developer" may mean higher expectations than just "developer". But you may also be expected to architect parts of systems, mentor more junior staff, provide guidance etc. Even more starkly, if you get promoted to something like "team lead" or a more managerial/executive level position, your need to be focus more on prioritization, managing people, etc. Very different skills than writing code.
Further down, the author wrote:
"The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm."
At which point, I have to admit, I said "WTF?" in my head. One could just as easily say the transformation into "syndrome" is rooted in a society that has shifted from focusing on actions and accountability to one that focuses ever more on inner-feelings as what is important.
Also, in my experience, people are already doing the thing before they get promoted to it. There's a continuum of skills. From developer to senior developer, you're not just one day developer with your heads down or writing code and the next day you're only architecting and mentoring others. You start out as a developer and if you're good at mentoring, people start to seek you out for questions and soon you become the mentor and you get promoted because you're already doing it in a small level and they want to reward you and encourage that. Similar for architecting the system, if you're a low level developer and thinking about architecture things you're already doing that work and you're reward it for it by giving more responsibility to do it more.
However, one thing to note is the senior level positions, the higher you go, the more you're a people person. A low-level developer can think about architecture all day long, but because they never talk to anyone about the ideas, discuss if it's really good or bad, understand the pros and cons of the ideas that others have, they're going to remain a low-level developer. This is why senior developers move in and out of management very often in a lot of companies. The jobs are not nearly as different as people would imagine. In both cases, you're more a people person than a technical person. It's just that as the senior developer, you still keep that developer hat on and write code, whereas as a manager, you're only a people person.
> The crux is that "competence" and promotion is not a one dimensional ladder where each promotion requires you to simply be more competent than in your previous position.
This doesn't contradict the Peter Principle, which doesn't imply you're increasing competence on a single axis.
In its most bare form, the principle states that people get promoted until they get stuck at a role in which they cannot adapt and do a bad job at. It never states it's a single dimension of competence or incremental over their last role.
The counterargument above is that people do not get promoted until they can’t do a good job at the new role - they only get the promotion once they’re good enough at their next position to get the promotion.
That's a good point. However, in my opinion, what you describe only happens sometimes; it's what companies claim they do, but very often they don't. I've seen too many times (embarrassingly, including myself on some occasions) people forcefully promoted to a role they are incompetent in. I've seen an extremely solid staff engineer get promoted to principal, riddled with bullshit responsibilities, given a bad performance review when he didn't meet them, and quitting as a result. It absolutely happens, and often.
An important element of the Peter Principle (the book) is that if you know that you have reached your upper competence limit in the organisation, you might have to take measures to prevent further promotion. Or in some cases (incompetence level achieved!) you might even have to engineer a way to drop back to your old job.
The book mentions the case of the guy who "accidentally" parked his car in the big boss's spot once a month or so, to forestall promotion.
A->A, B->C is also known as the Fibonacci law of hiring: 1st class people hire 1st class people (but may also hire 2nd class people), 2nd class people hire 3rd class people, etc.
I have to admit that while this principle makes intuitive sense, it seems to be assume that promotion and competence are so simply related. A few people are the "rock stars", but for most, in organizations I've been in, it seems like being promoted (or winning grants or otherwise getting power and money) is so competitive that it becomes its own sub-job requiring a lot of your bandwidth, thus probably reducing your competence.
In smaller companies (in germany) what I often observe is a combination of your latter point (it being its own sub-job thus reducing competence) and simply being in a company at the right time without any possibility of somebody challenging them.
I feel like actual competition is severely lacking leading to people not having an reward for success or consequence for failure.
After that people sink or swim. It depends whether they can learn enough to or their innate learning capacity has reached a limit.
Amusingly, the one example I’ve ever seen of someone quickly realising they’d been promoted into a role they weren’t capable of or suited to and choosing to leave it quickly as a result… was called Peter.
I don't think mixing the Peter principle with the advancement offered through unethical work offers more insights than both alone.
Really feels shoehorned in.
I don't know how accurate the description in TFA is, but it seems to me it's stating the petered employee, if they are self-aware enough to notice the corner they find themselves in, and desperate that their career is at stake, is more likely to turn to unethical paths in order to become valuable to the leadership. That's the connection.
My view of imposter syndrome is that it is often used as a cover used by actual imposters to self-soothe.
It's core to the functioning of our current system which promotes and rewards based on things other than merit. It's only natural that people who got stuff they didn't deserve would feel like imposters. The narrative of 'imposter syndrome' helps to persuade them that they aren't, that their feeling is normal and shared by 'all successful people'... Which is not entirely true but to the extent that it is true within certain groups of people, it is revealing. It does seem like there are large groups of imposters within our society who live in a parallel reality.
This idea is interesting to think about from an AI lense as well because AI can help hide incompetence a lot better.
Beyond the content, I'm pleasantly surprised to find this website design easier to read than most others.
> Imposters cloak themselves in a fog of obfuscation and busyness, so that the people around them can never say for sure what it is they are doing, or how well (or not) they are doing it.
Indeed, the more transparent a system is, the better it works toward its goals, since issues can be identified and fixed quickly. Of course, the nodes within the system that profit from obfuscation are determined to avoid real transparency across the network, as it would easily upend their parasitic game.
If we apply this to the global economy and society, we can see how billionaires, monopolistic companies, and other rent-seeking nodes wrap themselves in layers of obfuscation: PR, propaganda, media relations, politics, NDAs, patents. They then use those obscured resources to maintain and expand their illegitimate resources further through methods like lobbying, politics, tax loopholes, specialized laws.
Therefore, transparency is fundamental for any operating system to stay healthy, distribute power evenly, and avoid succumbing to the exploitation of a few power-aggregating parasitic nodes.
still think, that Dilbert's Principle is more true the situation, most people have no competence whatsoever
Nice, I give the following advice often, namely:
Very often, the cause of imposter syndrome is that there is, in fact, an imposter. It just ain't YOU.
Could you expand on this a bit?
It sounds like you're saying that someone else is making you (the receiver of the advice, not you, jrm4) feel incompetent. How are they doing so? Shifting the blame for their own incompetence? Trying to push work on you that really should be their work, but they can't do?
And, how would you detect this? By realizing that it shouldn't be your work? But that takes knowledge of how the organization should run that a person with imposter syndrome isn't likely to have. Even more, isn't likely to be confident that they have.
I am henceforth going to refer to toxic technobabble projects (e.g. "AI-all-the-things") as "Peter Projects."
It does help me understand why we've seen a wave of slimy shills rise up from the corporate detritus to lead impossible/meaningless projects that their co-workers despise.
I always thought that the peter principle is very flawed, in that it assumes an increasing level of competence required per job, and people whose qualities are static.
About the first, being manager is not inherently a more difficult job than being a senior IC. It's just a wildly different skillset.
About the second, reaching a position you can't do does not at all mean you'll never be able to do it. We learn.
The right insight there is that the switch to management as a necessary step to grow is horribly handled. But "leader as a profession" sucks as well, managers fundamentally ignorant of the kind of work they're managing.
I think what we need is a more fluid relationship between work and learning. We assume a college->work pipeline, when maybe we should have career stages at which we go back to further learning.
All of this is perfectly covered by the Peter principle. It doesn't assume an increase in difficulty at all, it just assumes a different skillset. People are promoted (maybe to manager) based on their performance in their previous job (maybe programmer). If they can adapt, great, and maybe they are even promoted further. If they cannot, they have reached their level of incompetence.
Why would going back to college help here? You don't need more certification you're already in and proved your value. As an outside and self taught I've always been fascinated. For a subset of people is it actually learn better in college style environments than on their own?
I'm not talking necessarily about college, I'm talking about getting proper learning space when the new job is significantly different, which is the point of the discussion.
I personally like self learning, but I've met way too many cases of managers that were great engineers and awful at people management. At the end of the day the truth is nobody explicitly taught them the new required skills.
We shouldn't base the system on their first reports being guinea pigs while the manager wings it.
In most (all?) jobs, you can’t make more $ in the same role outside of inflation adjustments. You want more, you need to move up or hop. Moving up separates one from what they were good at, and enjoyed. All of a sudden you are dealing with vacation requests and some HR portal.
This feels to me like a stretch. Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf studied data from the Argentinian army and compared it with historical accounts of dictatorships and coups, tracing differences between henchmen, coup plotters, and other members of the officer corps. These are situations where your physical survival often depends on what you do.
That's very different from company environments.
The Peter Principle is also unfortunately an overly simplistic model. Yes, some people can get promoted to a level where they technically can't cope anymore, but ability is rarely the measure by which people advance (except at the lowest grades where your political power is almost nil).
Smells awfully like the Gervais Principle to me, where the petering manager is part of the clueless class.
Note that the Peter Principle came long before the Gervais Principle. It might be more true to say that the Gervais Principle is largely a restatement of the Peter Principle.
I think they are related but focus on different things. The Gervais principle talks of losers, clueless and sociopaths (with a focus on the latter), not something the Peter Principle deals with. I'd say the Peter Principle deals mostly with what the Gervais Principle calls "the clueless".
The word illegal used a lot, but really, how pervasive is people doing illegal stuff at work? Surely not very.
There's plenty of stuff that goes on in large organisations which sits in what I would call "minor illegality" i.e. technically illegal, but the sort of thing people are going to pretend not to notice as long as they can have plausible deniability themselves.
The word “illegal” appears exactly once, paired with “unethical”. That doesn’t seem to be a major takeaway from the article to me.
> What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here. What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?
This seemed always baffling if someone openly "confessed" suffering from the imposter syndrome.
It is like calling yourself a "skeptic" and taking joy in dismantling other people's beliefs, yet reacting with extreme sensitivity the moment your own convictions are touched upon. Or if you were really paranoid, you would be unsure of everything (even of your paranoid state) so you wouldn't just confidently drop that label in conversation doing so usually serves as a polite excuse for being a "control freak" which in turn serves as an excuse for something else and so on.
In a broader sense this touches upon a deeper cultural issues around appearances and self-identification. In (a lot of) different cultures one rarely talks about an internal state in an abstract, systematic almost clinical manner instead a wide breadth of colorful almost childlike language is used to describe rising and ebbing feelings while at the same time one's actions are observed very diligently and somehow quietly tallied over time.
Under those circumstances, you can bluff, obfuscate or outright lie and it matters very little so long as your actions are deemed good conversely if you present yourself as genuine, "authentic," and vulnerable while your actual deeds are horrible: out you go. So overall there is less "flexibility" and more "accountability".
Apropos of nothing
It's a good story, but not a rigorous study. I believe at least one of the authors was in Academia so the idea may apply more in that industry. Also, someone told me that the author worked at WSU and applies more particularly there.