Peter principle
The Peter principle states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. It was formulated by Laurence J. Peter and set out, with Raymond Hull, in the 1969 book The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.
The reasoning is that promotion in most organizations is based on performance in the current role rather than on aptitude for the next one. An employee who performs well is promoted, and if they continue to perform well, they keep being promoted, until they reach a role where their skills no longer match the demands of the job. At that point they stop being promoted, because they are no longer performing well enough to earn further advancement, and they remain in that role indefinitely. The consequence, half-seriously argued by Peter and Hull, is that every post in a hierarchy tends over time to be filled by someone unable to perform its duties competently, since anyone who was competent at it has already been promoted onward.
In software organizations the principle is invoked most often around the promotion of strong individual-contributor engineers into management or technical leadership roles that call for a different skill set entirely, where excelling at writing code is only weakly related to excelling at managing the people who write it. It is one of the standard arguments for maintaining a dual career ladder, letting senior engineers advance in seniority and compensation without being funneled into management as the only path to progression.
See also
References
- Peter and Hull (1969). The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. William Morrow and Company.