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 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:)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 ...
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 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.
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.
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.
Usually, all sins are forgiven if a project launches on time.
Often it is board-level folks that have a naive understanding of the problem scope, and ruminate on their bruised ego from the harsh words burned-out staff spew.
There is also silly folks that honestly believe they will figure anything out faster, or can get away with a quick MVP bodge before jumping firms. I would argue they form an ecosystem, that keeps people that clean up messes fully employed. =3
Really feels shoehorned in.
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”.
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.
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.
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 ...
Very often, the cause of imposter syndrome is that there is, in fact, an imposter. It just ain't YOU.
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.
Often it is board-level folks that have a naive understanding of the problem scope, and ruminate on their bruised ego from the harsh words burned-out staff spew.
There is also silly folks that honestly believe they will figure anything out faster, or can get away with a quick MVP bodge before jumping firms. I would argue they form an ecosystem, that keeps people that clean up messes fully employed. =3