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.

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.

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).

Beyond the content, I'm pleasantly surprised to find this website design easier to read than most others.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Smells awfully like the Gervais Principle to me, where the petering manager is part of the clueless class.