Most people are probably not incentivized by promotions that give them a completely different task they might not even be good at, but by the increase in salary and status.

You can certainly have the latter kind without promoting e.g. the best programmers into mediocre managers.

The paper's suggestion to promote randomly or the worst is a bit silly. It only appears better than the alternative because they assume that there is no information about someone's competence at anything except their current job, and promoting someone is equivalent to firing them in favor of a fresh hire in their model.

> But promotion is one of the incentives to be best

Is that because many organizations tie together the concepts of higher pay/benefits and moving up in the managerial hierarchy?

Considering there is evidence that the Peter principle holds to a certain extent, that has always seemed odd to me. A person being best at one job is not a strong indicator that they'd be best at another. Personally, I have no desire to be promoted into roles that don't suit me.

Yes - pay/benefits are mostly related to hierarchy unless someone is a tech star mostly.

And even if not - the folks higher in the chain also get to decide what gets to be worked on.

My idea for a solution would be to offer better pay/benefits opportunities for your good developers, at the same time giving them also more creative freedom when they rise the ranks in a technical role.

Making management the only option for having a "career" is the issue.

Another option to avoid the downsides of the Peter Principle is to test drive people in their new roles. Basically you slowly add responsibilities that look more like the post-promotion job, if they do well they get the promotion and they've already proven to be able to do these things. If at some point you notice it isn't working, well then you don't promote them, or promote them to a different position.

This was famously discovered 60 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

> The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects.

One of the key findings of the Skunk Works project is that you unlock potential, a company needs to be willing to pay individual contributors more than their managers.

There are two different sorts of promotion. The first is a promotion in rank, where the job you do is fundamentally the same, but you are paid more for it because you're better at it.

The second is a promotion in office, where the job you do is fundamentally different, but you are paid more for it because your responsibilities are wider.

We get in trouble when we try to use the same mechanism for both. Promotions as incentive in the first case are fine. Promotions in the second are what this paper deals with, and are where the incentive aspect is more problematic.

In theory, yes.

I’d love to see a randomized trial of random vs “skill” based promotions for people management.

I’ve worked in civil service environments where promotions were driven by core management skills like reading/writing ability, analytical ability, and various management topics. In other positions there’s evaluation of project management ability, and others were appointed to positions by political process.

Although I didn’t study it, observationally, I saw no correlation between method of promotion/appointment and my ranking of them as a leader/manager.

Depending on role, even low skilled people can be excellent depending on EQ and circumstances.

Exactly my thought too. There is one more missing element here other than competence, namely Performance. The performance at a particular level depends on how the agents perceives the promotions are made. If randomly promoted or worse, promoted even without best performance, there is no incentive for people to perform even if they have the best competence.

Moreover, there is a reason why worst performer in terms of competence is the worst. The performance of people under his leadership is pretty much guaranteed to go down, as they are forced to fight his bad ideas or adjust.

Just handwaving here, but taking the best developer out of a team (to put them elsewhere) also makes the team's overall performance go down.

Yes. And he or she may also completely suck at new position. And also, if you have one superstar surrounded by weak people, someone is already doing bad job.

But, worst performed (which is not same as normal average performer) is very likely to suck at leading the thing he or she was unable to learn. Or unwilling to learn. If it is latter, you can expect unwillingness to learn new position too.

Of course, revolutionary idea would be to identify traits that are necessary for new position and look for those.

What is best? If I ignored all my coworkers I’d write a lot more code but it would be the wrong code.

Instead I work on a team and I act like it.