Given enough time — and assuming the existence of enough ranks in the hierarchy — each employee rises to, and remains at, his level of incompetence.

In time I saw that all such cases had a common feature. The employee had been promoted from a position of competence to a position of incompetence. I saw that, sooner or later, this could happen to every employee in every hierarchy.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

For each individual, for you, for me, the final promotion is from a level of competence to a level of incompetence.

IT SHOULD BE clear by now that when an employee reaches his level of incompetence, he can no longer do any useful work. Incompetent, Yes! Idle, No! This in no way suggests that the ultimate promotion suddenly changes the former worker into an idler. Not at all! In most cases he still wants to work; he still makes a great show of activity; he sometimes thinks he is working. Yet actually little that is useful is accomplished

Promotions Every time your company gives someone a promotion, everyone else at that person’s organizational level evaluates the promotion and judges whether merit or political favors yielded it. If the latter, then the other employees generally react in one of three ways: 1. They sulk and feel undervalued. 2. They outwardly disagree, campaign against the person, and undermine them in their new position. 3. They attempt to copy the political behavior that generated the unwarranted promotion. Clearly, you don’t want any of these behaviors in your company. Therefore, you must have a formal, visible, defensible promotion process that governs every employee promotion. Often this process must be different for people on your own staff. (The general process may involve various managers who are familiar with the employee’s work; the executive process should include the board of directors.) The purpose of the process is twofold. First, it will give the organization confidence that the company at least attempted to base the promotion on merit. Second, the process will produce the information necessary for your team to explain the promotion decisions you made.

As individuals we tend to climb to our levels of incompetence. We behave as though up is better and more is better, and yet all around us we see the tragic victims of this mindless escalation.

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens? — and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

Such an extreme policy will not be generally tolerated. So, to avoid the accumulation of incompetents, administrators have evolved the plan of promoting everyone, the incompetent as well as the competent. They find psychological justification for this policy by saying that it spares students the painful experience of failure.

The more conceited members of the race think in terms of an endless ascent — or promotion ad infinitum. I would point out that, sooner or later, man must reach his level of life-incompetence.

Many a man, under the old and the new systems, has made the upward step from candidate to legislator, only to achieve his level of incompetence.

Fascinatingly, as companies begin to struggle, the third category always seems to grow much faster than the first. In addition, the sudden wave of “semi-performance-related attrition” usually happens in companies that claim to have a “super-high talent bar.” How do all these superstar employees suddenly go from great to crap?

Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go.