#peter-principle — Public Fediverse posts

@johnquiggin It’s called the #PeterPrinciple. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Cry that it isn't, but you're wrong.

I know too many "meritocracies" that are full of homogeneous idiots. I know C-suites filled with #PeterPrinciple lottery winners who don't know how utterly stupid they are.

Look at the #Trump cabinet: now there's lowered standards for idiot cis-het whites. /4

The Plato Plateau

This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone: 

The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

1. Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.  
2. Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
3. Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
4. Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
5. When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
6. Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral. 
7. GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
8. When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
9. Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
10. Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual. 
11. Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
12. Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
    1. Survival – laws and tactics oriented
    2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette 
    3. Systems level order – algorithms and protocols oriented
    4. Self Knowledge and Meaning – reflecting on existing and consciousness 
    5. Meta-systems – theorizes about theories
13. Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises. 
14. Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
15. Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.

#action #anxiety #Business #existentialAnxiety #existentialism #exploration #GTD #identity #Kierkegaard #lifeDesign #mentalModels #personalDevelopment #PeterPrinciple #philosophy #PlatoPlateau #productivity #selfImprovement #stoicism #systemsThinking

@sven_giegold

Man kann mehrmals Opfer des #PeterPrinciple werden… Leider…

So,

1. Always a good reason. When I was at MS, it was management layers that destroy two projects

2. Usually bad. If a company is making money, then firing your staff that made it happen is poor optics and makes for disgruntled ex-employees

But 1+2 mean you'll have ex-MS managers entering the job market where they're likely to do significant damage to smaller companies, that can't take the financial hit of their inabilities.

#MicrosoftLayoffs #PeterPrinciple

🧠 Categorical Peter Principle

Let’s model the Peter Principle as a (somewhat playful) functor:

Covariant Peter Functor:

Let C be the category of competence levels.

Let R be the category of responsibility levels.

Then a functor F:C→R maps increasing competence to increasing responsibility.

But (here’s the punchline):
This functor preserves structure only up to the breaking point.

At each step, you’re promoted to a position requiring slightly more competence than you currently have. The mapping continues until the functor fails to be faithful—you get promoted past the limits of your competence, and the correspondence breaks.

(by now you know who wrote this)

#peterprinciple #categorytheory

#AgileCheese is rooted in the brilliance of the Peter Principle—why stop at your level of competence when you can rise above it? 🧀 In #agile, we embrace the idea of reaching for positions beyond our abilities, stretching those limits until we outgrow them. And it’s no accident that my first name is Peter—I’m here to take you beyond the point of no return, where #cheese meets unstoppable excellence! 🚀 #PeterPrinciple

In a hierarchy, everybody rises to the level where they are incompetent. John Crace's sketch references the #PeterPrinciple - but I'm not sure how widely it is still known ... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/28/rise-of-chris-philp-tests-the-limits-of-the-peter-principle

When I first read it, it was depressing 😥:

“Born In Vancouver, The Peter Principle Explains Why Your Boss Is Incompetent. Here’s Why It Still Resonates”, CBC News (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/peter-principle-vancouver-history-1.7415994).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575200

#PeterPrinciple #Books #Work #Incompetence #Career

@GottaLaff
I sense the intersection of the #TechnocraticMeritocracy chnocraticMeritocracy with the #PeterPrinciple.

#WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong?

Even when your org employs thousands of extremely well educated and charismatic experts in all the right fields …

… many org decisions will NOT be made by experts. Or the well informed.

#peterprinciple #committees

"The Peter Principle" is a term coined in 1969 by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull — it was the name of their book exploring the idea that employees are often promoted beyond their level of competence. Big Think's Jonny Thomson says this is often a consequence of rewarding good followers with leadership positions. "What Hull and Peter point out is that it makes no sense at all to assume that someone who’s lived their career in unoriginal subordination would suddenly become Abraham Lincoln with a corner office," he writes. Here's his story for Big Think about what we can learn from the theory — and how we can avoid its pitfalls.

https://flip.it/QN3-fX

#Work #Lifestyle #PeterPrinciple #HumanResources #Business #Philosophy

Peter's Principle (2007) [5 min] by Jim Lacy and Kathrin Albers | #Germany

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGhTBqLkrZ4

#StopMotion #AnimatedShort #AnimatedShortOfTheDay #Animation #Incompetence #Theory #PeterPrinciple #Satire

My institution is going through some changes...

Our org chart is like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, "Move down, move down! Clean cups, clean cups!"

Or maybe it's a #PeterPrinciple experiment: everyone gets promoted to their level of incompetency.

[For the record, all of the new and interim candidates I know, and participated in open forum/feedback or committees, I heartily approve of. I just don't know what comes next...]

https://www.pittstate.edu/gorillaconnection/2024/05/university-announces-academic-leadership-changes.html

As someone else's experience has just reminded me, becoming a manager isn't a promotion; it's a job change.

It's a broken workplace that forces a talented engineer (or aid worker, or writer, or whatever) to become a mediocre manager just to keep their career from stalling.

C.f. the Peter Principle

#PeterPrinciple #management #careers

@scalzi He could have spent the rest of his life as a senior partner at a white shoe law firm, being paid $500K or more a year to take prospective clients to lunch. But he chose the path of madness.
____________
#PeterPrinciple

With the coming of A.I. as an end-user application, we're going to see people failing upwards like never before. If you have been amazed at the sub-optimal quality of executives and managers in your working life, imagine how even less qualified people will now be able to percolate to the top, able to fake college-level skills in writing, art, argument, coding, planning...

Fuck the Peter Principle, we're in for the Peterpocalypse.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #PeterPrinciple #Peterpocalypse

We find that firms manage the costs of the Peter Principle by placing less weight on sales performance in promotion decisions when managerial roles entail greater responsibility and when frontline workers are incentivized by strong pay for performance.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/4/2085/5550760

#PeterPrinciple #work #articles #research

OMFG - Software engineer allegedly stole $300K from an e-commerce site by copying Office Space \sp\

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/6/23542859/office-space-fraud-zulily-employee-security

#officespace #theft #stripe #peterprinciple #technology #hacking #infosec #itsecurity #it #comedy #movie #reallife