[Red Badger]

‘Splains government employees..................

[Textide]

It would seem to be especially pertinent to government employees.

[dsrtsage]

“In other words, a front-office secretary who is quite good at her job looking and has a nice rack may thus be promoted to executive assistant to the CEO for which she is not trained or prepared for”

[ETCM]

According to the Peter Principle, every position in a given hierarchy will eventually be filled by employees who are incompetent to fulfill the job duties of their respective positions.

While many people do rise to the level of their incompetency, it is FAR from "every position". You don't go from "good enough to get promoted" straight to incompetency, and your lack of potential for increased responsibility is not invisible to your supervisor/manager. There is some level of meritocracy in the vast majority of promotions, and someone doing a "just acceptable" job is not likely to be promoted to a more challenging position. When was the last time you saw a company that just promoted people because they were "next"?

The Peter Principal is much more likely to be demonstrated in bureaucracies with a union/socialist mentality. Local governments are the worst. It is unlikely to be seen in organizations that actually measure performance, and that is by far the norm.

[minnesota_bound]

I read "The Peter Principle" back when I started working full time. Later I read "The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions".

I seen many of the things explained in the books in the companies I have worked at.

I currently am in an office where many competent people were fired by the new big boss soon after he was hired and who merged a dept with ours whose manager does not know anything about the other dept. He told the rest of us we could not talk to them. He likes procedure so you gotta email them instead of walking 10ft and getting a quick answer.....

He is in all day meetings which you know accomplish little. The new big boss renamed many depts and email links and moved things to the "cloud" where the files we need are now hard to find. Looks like he did stuff but only rearranged the deck chairs. I expect he will move on to another company in a few years after disrupting things.

He had to hire a supervisor from our office whose main function looks to be bad mouthing our east coast counterparts and anyone in our office when they step out on break. He is like a yippie dog.