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Yes, You Can Blame Your Pointy-Haired Boss On the Peter Principle
Nerval's Lobster writes: You've heard of the Peter Principle, which suggests that all employees manage to rise to the level of their incompetence. (That is to say, everybody is promoted until their skills and strengths no longer align with their current position.) While the Peter Principle is often treated as a truism, a recent Gallup study (registration required)—the result of four decades' worth of research, involving 2.5 million manager-led teams—suggests that it holds a significant degree of real-world truth. "Gallup has found that only 10 percent of working people possess the talent to be a great manager," the study mentions in its introduction. "Companies use outdated notions of succession to put people in these roles." In Gallup's estimation, there are so many bad managers out there that one out of every two employees have "left their job to get away," according to the study. "Managers who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the U.S. economy $319 billion to $398 billion annually." In other words, there are a lot of pointy-haired managers out there.
As a result of these norms, it's easier to fire 10% of your workforce then lower all pay by 10%.
I know this may be the exception that proves the rule, but my former company did just that; across the board 10% pay cut to the entire organization, including management. Every one of us hated it, but the smarter of us did realize that it probably saved some peoples' jobs. It had the unintended side effect of taking top performers and encouraging them to perform at 90% (or less), however...
Wasn't the original idea behind business school finding and training good managerial candidates (which are apparently quite hard to come by)? Not teaching piranhas how best to outsource the labor force and High Frequency Hump the stock market?
All I'm saying is, I agree that good managers are hard to come by, and maybe we should have a school for that.
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I worked as a video game tester for six years. A fellow tester would get promoted to assistant lead tester, lead tester, and supervisor. Those who become supervisors think they're the best testers out of the whole bunch. Not exactly. One supervisor became the QA manager and discovered to his PHB chargin that the best testers got 50% raises. None of the supervisors have ever gotten a 50% raise. I've gotten two 50% raises as a tester and made more money than the guy who became the QA manager years earlier even though we got hired at the same time.
I work in an organization that struggles with this. One of my guys is a very competent technical resource who deserves to be paid more than we are "allowed" to pay him based on his current title / position. Our company is a consulting company and the compensation model was designed to reward managers who are leading large teams of people on client engagements. The model is not flexible enough to reward people in technical positions who do not have direct reports.
In order to hack the system, we had to setup a bunch of dotted line reports for him on the organization chart. He does not technically "manage" them because he is not responsible for performance reviews and all of those other fun managerial tasks. But since he could technically delegate to them, they count towards his head count requirement.
There is a tangential corollary here. Often times employees are expected to do a job / handle the responsibilities of a position for a year or more before they officially given the title and pay that goes along with it. In that way, organizations protect themselves by trying out an employee in a position before promoting them.
While the above is okay, it potentially puts the employee in a disadvantageous position. Unless they are willing to negotiate or leave for another job, they run the risk of getting stuck doing work far above their pay grade without reaping any of the benefits.
I just quit Micro^h^h^h^h for this exact reason.
Over a period of 5 years:
Hired in.
Report to a guy who looks 12, but turns out to be an Excellent Manager*.
Do my best work in a decade.
Excellent Manager reorg'ed from Inspiring General Manager to Disastrous Director.
Excellent Manager is driven out by political fuckery by Disastrous Director.
Disastrous Director is fired for malfeasance.
Inspiring General Manager won't come back, had enough, quits managing to do research.
Report to Microsoft Lifer, old EM's technical manager a who does a passable job leading.
Microsoft Lifer is reorg'ed under General Manager/Bottlewasher who can't stop micromanaging.
Lifer gets ruthlessly fucked with, has entire team's work credited to incompetent Level 67 Blowhard.
Lifer's team is reorg'ed under Blowhard, except for me+handful.
Old EM's peer Last Asskicking Manager quits because he won't work for Blowhard.
GM/Bottlewasher can't stop micromanaging everyone.
Lifer gives up and takes a non-mgmt job.
Report to McManager hired from military, who used to manage 600.
GM/Bottlewasher can't stop micromanaging everyone.
McManager reorg'ed, team reduced to 5.
Blowhard steals work output from McManager, leaving no credit.
GM/Bottlewasher lines up all resources behind Blowhard.
McManager demoted to my peer.
Report to new guy Perennial Survivor, brought in by another reog.
Lifer demoted to my peer.
Old Excellent Manager quits to work for Amazon, because it's saner(!!!).
Survivor admits 80% of Botlewasher's 2015-16 yearly plan is bullshit makework.
Fuck this noise, quit. Even a startup is saner.
*only one in 5 years.
It's easier for incompetence to hide in large enterprises. They used to write books about how great Redmond managers were. Now the entire enterprise is infested with pointy-haired, risk-averse, beige, wannabe-hipsters who can't make any decisions other than to stab each other in the back. And front. And sides. Precious few people do actual work, when so much effort is devoted to bad management and the shielding of productive people from that bad management.
I think not...(*poof*)
When I worked for old school companies my managers LOVED me.
Why? Because they had to be paid as much or more than me. So every time I _extorted_ the big boss for more money, they got a raise too.
I really didn't appreciate when they told the rest of the team I had taken the entire 'raise budget'. They really didn't appreciate when I told the rest of the team I had taken 150% of the 'raise budget' and they should all grow a pair.
Salary caps? That's what is know as 'a wish'. They wish to keep your salary below that number. Let them wish into one hand and shit into the other...
If you are that good, they will make up a new job category.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have had a manager like that, in a computer repair firm. Before he was thrust upon us by IBM (Incredible Bureaucratic Machine), morale on the workfloor was excellent, but he managed to get it down to far below zero in no time. He literally told us that 'He did not know what happened on the workfloor, he did not need to know and he did not want to know.' All he looked at was figures: the more repairs one wrote up, the better.
So, someone who just slammed the parts of a laptop together, had a few screws left and just looked if it did switch on after that, got a better qualification than someone who carefully reassembled one and tested the machine before sending it back to the customer. The first did more 'repairs' on a day (but most of those came back because the machines were still broken), the last hardly ever had a re-repair, but trying to explain that on a performance review was totally useless.
Needless to say that every competent repair engineer in the shop hated the guy's guts...
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
When I was in that situation, programmers, engineers, developers - whatever the title was - had a cap of salary. Meaning your senior architect god's gift to the technical couldn't go above a low level manager's salary. If you wanted more, you gotta go management. And what sucked, many times you topped out at your company, but your pay was waayy above every other company's.
This is pretty much why the Peter Principle exists. We have a bizarre notion that management is somehow "better" or "above" technical work, when in many cases managers are in the job they do because they are not actually good at doing technical work, but they are good at the big picture and knowing where resources need to be spent. Similarly technical people, who are usually more concerned with the problem than the solution, often feel they need to jump to management but are not good at that work and do not want to leave the technical work. So you end up with a lot of unqualified positions they don't truly want to be in, but need the money.
I have been doing this for a while now, I'm still not convinced even one very good manager is worth more than one very good engineer, nor are they harder to find if you don't create a reality via pay grades. My present company perhaps encourages people to stay technical, and we have a few people who would be strong managers who are staying technical because that's where the money is at while the managers have far too much risk of being fired. But most of my previous employers were the opposite: good engineers who got promoted up because they were good engineers, but had no particular managerial talent. HR created the reality where you promote them, or watch them leave. So they got promoted.
Place I work at had a single manager over the entire department. Under two expansions, she still managed consistently good performance reviews and kept the idiocy of other departments at bay.
She was replaced by two managers. One was forced to retire early after a near fatal accident she caused, and the other...
There were week long celebrations after her retirement. I can only imagine it was similar to the relief felt when Carly Fiorina was drummed out of HP. It was that bad.
Now we have four additional middle managers. The entire department is a clusterfuck of miscommunication and petty turf wars. They haven't quite grasped the exodus that has been happening with people quitting, and certainly seem oblivious to the contempt the underlings have for them. Lawsuits are starting, and the complaints are written off as the disgruntled.
And of course, since we are short-staffed now with increasing demands, there is talk of... even more managers and dividing the department into smaller departments, since it is too unwieldy for 6 people to handle.
Fuck me.
> The problem isn't the managers, it's the cats.
If you're a manager that thinks like that, you're a shitty manager (which according to the above, is the norm).
The process of software development isn't a factory process, despite all the attempts to turn it into one. The qualities that make someone a good software developer does mean that they are more like cats - they've had engage in self-directed learning about their chosen field for most of their career, because it's continually refreshed. It's literally so new, that the gap between those writing the book, forging new tech, and those reading it, learning the new tech, is usually measured in months. This leads to an independent mindset. They are not pack animals. If you want good work, you need to learn to manage this kind of people.
The alternative is what we see in Indian outsourcing outfits. The reason Indian shops are so prized for outsourcing isn't their exemplary skill, it's the Indian culture of deference and respect - which means they are obedient, and toe the line, and work hard on what you told them to work on. They're not cats, they're dogs.
Managers love this because it seems like they are getting exactly what they wanted.
Alas, it means they are getting exactly what they wanted - and the Peter Principle reminds us that this is the wrong thing, because they are not competent to decide this, which means they are spending a lot of money on developing the wrong solution.
I've worked for one company that I thought did a rather smart thing: They separated out the "manager" and "boss" roles.
So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group. The "boss" was a rather technical guy who was not good at managing, and did not want to manage, and who mostly worked as part of the team. The "manager" was treated more as a resource to keep the group working effectively, and really wasn't "in charge". For any substantial decisions, the manager would discuss it with the boss, and the boss would make a decision.
Admittedly, it was a small company doing a rather niche set of work, but it worked really well. There seemed to be something to the idea.