Loading...
Kai joined NovaCorp in 2019 as a junior backend engineer. Within six months, she'd refactored the payment system, cutting transaction failures by 40%. Her manager, Sol, promoted her to senior engineer. By 2021, Kai had shipped three major features and mentored two interns. Sol promoted her to engineering manager of a 12-person team. At first, things went well — Kai ran tight standups and cleared blockers fast. But she kept diving into the code herself instead of delegating. Her team's velocity actually rose 15% that year, mostly because Kai was doing the work of two engineers while also managing. The VP of Engineering, Ren, saw the numbers and promoted Kai to Director of Engineering, overseeing 4 teams and 48 people. Now Kai's days were filled with budget meetings, cross-departmental ne...
Popular framing: Kai was a great engineer who let her ego carry her into a job she couldn't do; her manager should have spotted the limits.
Structural analysis: A hierarchy that rewards past performance with promotion treats each rung as proof of fitness for the next, so the Peter Principle reliably pushes high performers past their circle of competence. Each level rewarded a different skill the previous level never tested for, and Dunning–Kruger asymmetry plus Hanlon's-razor charity at the manager tier delayed naming the misfit until attrition was already compounding. A different person climbing the same ladder lands in the same place.
The popular framing individualizes a structural failure, which is dangerous because it produces the wrong intervention (coach Kai, or replace her) rather than the right one (redesign the promotion and measurement system). If NovaCorp only fixes Kai's successor, the next high-performing IC will follow an identical trajectory. The gap also obscures accountability: Ren made three consequential promotion decisions using a metric that had no predictive validity for leadership potential.
