Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomMasz | Hacker News Reader

At a company I once worked for failure was anything but a barrier to getting offered newer, bigger opportunities. Those who did well often get stuck in the same place without further advancement.

View on HN

Ahh failing upwards - seeing this concept up close and so often early in my career really messed with my head.

I have come to expect it in politics, but I was surprised to see it in engineering.

It's often a case of becoming (or believed to be) so essential to a product that moving them is considered to be dangerous. It really feels like being just competent enough is your best bet for career growth.

I've observed that also being completely incompetent doesn't hurt. But you must continuously demo your completely trivial achievements (or demo someone else's achievements before they are ready and can do it themselves).

Engineering has humans in it. Same as politics. All with human brains using the same architecture full of biases. It's not very surprising to be honest

Can you share some examples?

IC has terrible technical skills --> make them a manager so they stop screwing up the codebase.

Project is behind schedule because of mismanagement --> give them a bigger team because that's what they claim they need to get back on track.

Then they move on to the next sucker, I mean, company claiming they were in charge of a huge team, so they deserve a bigger raise.

Team size (the number of people under you) is a big determiner of compensation.

"We have to get them off the shop floor, they get everything wrong, break things and are costing us millions - lets promote them to management."

Ha ha, yes, that does happen. Usually with poor results. But... I have seen the opposite case, a person who had great organizational and people skills, and bench skills that were an utter disaster -- but was self-aware enough to realize they needed to be more "hands-off". It turns out that they were self-aware enough to appreciate those bench skills in other people, and good at doing the other things needed to keep a shop productive. I admit, though, this is not guaranteed to happen.

Now that's one way to counteract the Peter Principle!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com