Comment by tombert

In my experience, I kind of think that The Dilbert Principle [1] holds more than the Peter Principle.

With the Peter Principle, it's implied that they were good at their previous job and are bad at their current one, but having had to debug awful, awful, broken code at Apple by people who had been promoted into managers or directors, I'm not convinced that they were ever good at their job. I remember some code we had in iTunes, my manager would say "that was written by X. Don't worry, he's been safely promoted out of danger".

I think management, especially higher management, is often about how much you can make it look like you're doing important things. It requires zero effort or skill to book a dozen meetings in Outlook or Google Calendar, and it only requires a fairly small amount of effort to make slide shows to talk about how "important" the work is that you're doing. Instead of getting good at engineering and writing good software, it's much easier and more effective to tell people how good at engineering and writing software you are instead. Most of the higher-level managers are pretty removed from the low-level work so when promotions come along, they remember the person who kept booking all the meetings with them and assume what they were doing is important.

I'm admittedly more than a little cynical about this stuff; I have been routinely negative about big corporations (and particularly Apple) and I think that the Peter Principle is assuming a level of rationality and intelligence that I really haven't observed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle#Definition Not saying I'm a huge fan of Scott Adams, but I don't know any other name for this principle.