8 ms·

The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (2009)

101 points by sejtnjir 8y ago

jezclaremurugan 8y ago
But promotion is one of the incentives to be best - so unless the other incentives are stronger - promoting randomly or promoting the worst performers will remove a strong incentive and will pull down the productivity of the organization anyway. Or there should be an explicit test for the skills needed at the next level.
- arunmp 8y ago
  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.
- watwut 8y ago
  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.
  - tom_mellior 8y ago
    Just handwaving here, but taking the best developer out of a team (to put them elsewhere) also makes the team's overall performance go down.
    - watwut 8y ago
      Yes. And he or she may also completely suck at new position. And also, if you have one superstar surrounded by weak people, someone is already doing bad job. But, worst performed (which is not same as normal average performer) is very likely to suck at leading the thing he or she was unable to learn. Or unwilling to learn. If it is latter, you can expect unwillingness to learn new position too. Of course, revolutionary idea would be to identify traits that are necessary for new position and look for those.
- Firadeoclus 8y ago
  > 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.
  - jezclaremurugan 8y ago
    Yes - pay/benefits are mostly related to hierarchy unless someone is a tech star mostly. And even if not - the folks higher in the chain also get to decide what gets to be worked on.
    - carlmr 8y ago
      My idea for a solution would be to offer better pay/benefits opportunities for your good developers, at the same time giving them also more creative freedom when they rise the ranks in a technical role. Making management the only option for having a "career" is the issue. Another option to avoid the downsides of the Peter Principle is to test drive people in their new roles. Basically you slowly add responsibilities that look more like the post-promotion job, if they do well they get the promotion and they've already proven to be able to do these things. If at some point you notice it isn't working, well then you don't promote them, or promote them to a different position.
      - gowld 8y ago
        This was famously discovered 60 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works > The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects. One of the key findings of the Skunk Works project is that you unlock potential, a company needs to be willing to pay individual contributors more than their managers.
- yorwba 8y ago
  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.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  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.
- hinkley 8y ago
  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.
- regularfry 8y ago
  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.
megaman22 8y ago
I recall that I first learned about the Peter Principle at the same time that I was reading Lee's Lieutenants by Douglas Southall Freeman, and there was a weird synergy between the two. As the war continued, attrition took its toll on the Army of Northern Virginia's officer corps, notably after Jackson's death at Chancelorsville. The two generals that replaced him, Ewell and A.P. Hill, were very good divisional commanders, but poor corps commanders. That tome is littered with other examples of officers excelling at one level of command, but being ill-equipped to perform at the next level.
- smogcutter 8y ago
  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)
folli 8y ago
I wonder about a possible opposite principle: a person best suited for a role in leadership is stuck at the bottom of the hierarchy, because he's not fully competent at this current role, so he has no way to climb up.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  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.
  - sejtnjir 8y ago
    A mediocre individual contributor could be a competent project manager.
    - carlmr 8y ago
      I'd agree with this, there is some overlap, but mostly these are distinct skills (people skills vs. technical skills).
      - nerdponx 8y ago
        That could be the reason for it. Mediocre engineer finds that they have a better head for managing people and schedules than lines of code. Either they talk to management, or management notices and offers the transfer.
      - lloeki 8y ago
        > these are distinct skills (people skills vs. technical skills) I believe most people here will agree with that statement; nonetheless the problem is the ludicrous situation some people view the world through and consider that "junior techie moves to senior manager" as a fact of life†. There is real social pressure on that front and lots of belittling of tech. Basically every time I meet some new person and say that I'm a software engineer, I get asked "But you still code at your age? Surely you'd rather manage people! What have you even achieved in life?" or any variation thereof and have to explain, justify even, that designing, planning, architecting, maintaining, and developing software is a real expertise domain in and of itself. The situation extends even in the workplace, where it is mostly expected of you to raise to management positions, and you won't get any raise if you don't "move past" "coding", as coding is largely considered a menial task by many, a sort of weird heritage of/transposition from an industrial culture. † This has a vicious side effect of creating an ecosystem with mostly zero-quality software, since somehow only juniors and unskilled seniors code, because either skilled coders raise up the management hierarchy to get some raises, just leave for places/countries with a better mindset, or are overwhelmed by their unskilled peers.
ManFromUranus 8y ago
The gervais principle is more interesting than the peter principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- bsilvereagle 8y ago
  > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
irq-1 8y ago
> in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence. Too funny. Ever think your company was promoting without thought or reason, or promoting the worst people? It turns out the corporate HR/Management system has evolved to defeat the Peter Principle.
- coffeeacc 8y ago
  Genetic mutation, evolution.
- kybernetikos 8y ago
  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.
- asangha 8y ago
  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-Management-Afflictions/dp/0887308589 https://www.amazon.com/Dilbert-Principle-Cubicles-Eye-Manage...
failrate 8y ago
It should also be standard practice that a person's promotion is accompanied by expectation setting and training. Otherwise, no one could ever grow out of their current shell.
cbcoutinho 8y ago
View the arxiv paper as a webpage: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0907.0455/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0907.0455/
ythn 8y ago
Why not just have a configurable threshold (say, 2 years) where if the promoted person is determined incompetent in their new role, they are bumped back down to their previous role (keeping their same pay) where they are more efficient/competent.
- regularfry 8y ago
  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.
- gowld 8y ago
  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.
  - ythn 8y ago
    If I were running the company, I'd just masquerade the demotion as a promotion: 1. Promote from principal engineer to technical manager 2. 2 years later -> this person sucks at management but they were a great engineer 3. "Promote" from technical manager -> principal engineer level 2
    - s2g 8y ago
      moving backt o high level IC isn't usually considered the same way. You just move the person to work on something else as IC, and they say it was their choice because they like being a Principal engineer better.
richmarr 8y ago
A lot of comments here are using word like "promotion", starting at the "bottom", powers reserved for "higher ups", etc. following the standard framing of hierarchy as a vertical pyramid, which I think possibly encourages the view of promotion as status. My favourite reframing of team hierarchy is to change the language to make it horizontal or fully inverted. In the horizontal case, promotion might be 'stepping back a rank to help co-ordinate'. In the inverted case, promotion might be 'stepping down into a supporting role' (although that particular language bumps into confusing euphamisms left over by the pyramid framing). I'm sure some better language can be found but you get the idea.
anotheryou 8y ago
which is why you shouldn't promote by the numbers and instead have a look for who is best at the qualities required for the level above. A good manager shouldn't find that hard to figure out and can also probe at it by changing responsibilities more gradually.

101 points by sejtnjir 8y ago

But promotion is one of the incentives to be best - so unless the other incentives are stronger - promoting randomly or promoting the worst performers will remove a strong incentive and will pull down the productivity of the organization anyway. Or there should be an explicit test for the skills needed at the next level.

arunmp 8y ago
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.
watwut 8y ago
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.
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  Just handwaving here, but taking the best developer out of a team (to put them elsewhere) also makes the team's overall performance go down.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Yes. And he or she may also completely suck at new position. And also, if you have one superstar surrounded by weak people, someone is already doing bad job. But, worst performed (which is not same as normal average performer) is very likely to suck at leading the thing he or she was unable to learn. Or unwilling to learn. If it is latter, you can expect unwillingness to learn new position too. Of course, revolutionary idea would be to identify traits that are necessary for new position and look for those.
Firadeoclus 8y ago
> 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.
- jezclaremurugan 8y ago
  Yes - pay/benefits are mostly related to hierarchy unless someone is a tech star mostly. And even if not - the folks higher in the chain also get to decide what gets to be worked on.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    My idea for a solution would be to offer better pay/benefits opportunities for your good developers, at the same time giving them also more creative freedom when they rise the ranks in a technical role. Making management the only option for having a "career" is the issue. Another option to avoid the downsides of the Peter Principle is to test drive people in their new roles. Basically you slowly add responsibilities that look more like the post-promotion job, if they do well they get the promotion and they've already proven to be able to do these things. If at some point you notice it isn't working, well then you don't promote them, or promote them to a different position.
    - gowld 8y ago
      This was famously discovered 60 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works > The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects. One of the key findings of the Skunk Works project is that you unlock potential, a company needs to be willing to pay individual contributors more than their managers.
yorwba 8y ago
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.
Spooky23 8y ago
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.
hinkley 8y ago
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.
regularfry 8y ago
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.

megaman22 8y ago

I recall that I first learned about the Peter Principle at the same time that I was reading Lee's Lieutenants by Douglas Southall Freeman, and there was a weird synergy between the two. As the war continued, attrition took its toll on the Army of Northern Virginia's officer corps, notably after Jackson's death at Chancelorsville. The two generals that replaced him, Ewell and A.P. Hill, were very good divisional commanders, but poor corps commanders. That tome is littered with other examples of officers excelling at one level of command, but being ill-equipped to perform at the next level.

smogcutter 8y ago
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)

folli 8y ago

I wonder about a possible opposite principle: a person best suited for a role in leadership is stuck at the bottom of the hierarchy, because he's not fully competent at this current role, so he has no way to climb up.

nerdponx 8y ago
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.
- sejtnjir 8y ago
  A mediocre individual contributor could be a competent project manager.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    I'd agree with this, there is some overlap, but mostly these are distinct skills (people skills vs. technical skills).
    - nerdponx 8y ago
      That could be the reason for it. Mediocre engineer finds that they have a better head for managing people and schedules than lines of code. Either they talk to management, or management notices and offers the transfer.
    - lloeki 8y ago
      > these are distinct skills (people skills vs. technical skills) I believe most people here will agree with that statement; nonetheless the problem is the ludicrous situation some people view the world through and consider that "junior techie moves to senior manager" as a fact of life†. There is real social pressure on that front and lots of belittling of tech. Basically every time I meet some new person and say that I'm a software engineer, I get asked "But you still code at your age? Surely you'd rather manage people! What have you even achieved in life?" or any variation thereof and have to explain, justify even, that designing, planning, architecting, maintaining, and developing software is a real expertise domain in and of itself. The situation extends even in the workplace, where it is mostly expected of you to raise to management positions, and you won't get any raise if you don't "move past" "coding", as coding is largely considered a menial task by many, a sort of weird heritage of/transposition from an industrial culture. † This has a vicious side effect of creating an ecosystem with mostly zero-quality software, since somehow only juniors and unskilled seniors code, because either skilled coders raise up the management hierarchy to get some raises, just leave for places/countries with a better mindset, or are overwhelmed by their unskilled peers.

ManFromUranus 8y ago

The gervais principle is more interesting than the peter principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

bsilvereagle 8y ago
> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296

irq-1 8y ago

> in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence. Too funny. Ever think your company was promoting without thought or reason, or promoting the worst people? It turns out the corporate HR/Management system has evolved to defeat the Peter Principle.

coffeeacc 8y ago
Genetic mutation, evolution.
kybernetikos 8y ago
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.
asangha 8y ago
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-Management-Afflictions/dp/0887308589 https://www.amazon.com/Dilbert-Principle-Cubicles-Eye-Manage...

failrate 8y ago

It should also be standard practice that a person's promotion is accompanied by expectation setting and training. Otherwise, no one could ever grow out of their current shell.

cbcoutinho 8y ago

View the arxiv paper as a webpage: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0907.0455/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0907.0455/

ythn 8y ago

Why not just have a configurable threshold (say, 2 years) where if the promoted person is determined incompetent in their new role, they are bumped back down to their previous role (keeping their same pay) where they are more efficient/competent.

regularfry 8y ago
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.
gowld 8y ago
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.
- ythn 8y ago
  If I were running the company, I'd just masquerade the demotion as a promotion: 1. Promote from principal engineer to technical manager 2. 2 years later -> this person sucks at management but they were a great engineer 3. "Promote" from technical manager -> principal engineer level 2
  - s2g 8y ago
    moving backt o high level IC isn't usually considered the same way. You just move the person to work on something else as IC, and they say it was their choice because they like being a Principal engineer better.

richmarr 8y ago

A lot of comments here are using word like "promotion", starting at the "bottom", powers reserved for "higher ups", etc. following the standard framing of hierarchy as a vertical pyramid, which I think possibly encourages the view of promotion as status. My favourite reframing of team hierarchy is to change the language to make it horizontal or fully inverted. In the horizontal case, promotion might be 'stepping back a rank to help co-ordinate'. In the inverted case, promotion might be 'stepping down into a supporting role' (although that particular language bumps into confusing euphamisms left over by the pyramid framing). I'm sure some better language can be found but you get the idea.

anotheryou 8y ago

which is why you shouldn't promote by the numbers and instead have a look for who is best at the qualities required for the level above. A good manager shouldn't find that hard to figure out and can also probe at it by changing responsibilities more gradually.