The RETEP Principle

A few decades ago, Lawrence Peter coined the "Peter Principle". The core idea is that employees who do their jobs well will tend to get promoted to jobs that they aren't good at, and will stay there for the rest of their professional careers, both miserable and ineffective. "People tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence," is its standard formulation.

This hasn't happened to me. In part it's because I've avoided it. I know I'd be a lousy manager, so I've taken care not to put myself in a position where someone might ask me to take that on. For example, in one situation when my boss had decided to quit (which meant that I might be considered to take over some or even all of his supervisory duties), I talked him out of it. I didn't want the promotion.

Instead, my career path in the past decade has gone in the opposite direction. I took a job that was "beneath me" for several years, because it enabled me to go back to school. Now I've taken a job that's possibly another half-step down from that, because it's better than being unemployed. My family confidently tell me that I'll get back up to where I "belong" as soon as my new employer sees my skills and has an opening for me.

I'm not so sure. It's possible for a person to be demoted down to their level of incompetence. After all, there's nothing that says that someone in a "higher" position is necessarily qualified to do all of the jobs beneath him. Good heavens, my last boss couldn't have done my job even if the fate of the world was riding on it.

The job I'm starting soon is (more or less) one that I've done before: computer tech support. But that was many years ago and a lot has changed in the meantime. The technology is different, meaning that my encyclopedic, intimate knowledge of WordPerfect 5, Netware 4, ISA motherboards, and Pentium-class processors is now worthless. The users are different, meaning that I'll encounter people who've been using computers since they were 7 years old with more advanced problems (and expectations), not just newcomers who'll be impressed that I know how to change the system's default printer or how to reconfigure their BIOS to skip the floppy drive when booting. And I'm different, meaning that I'm no longer the energetic and patient soul who once could spend half an hour helping make repeated attempts to set his password... without telling him he's a fucking idiot for not being able to pick out an 8-character combination of letters and numbers and remember it long enough to type it twice in a row.

I'm also self-aware enough to recognise that I don't learn as easily as I did 20 years ago, so getting up to speed on the latest technology (something I rarely got to see in my previous job) might not be as easy at it was the first time. For that matter, the technology itself has become fundamentally more complex. it used to be possible to recite every CPU/speed combination curently on the PC market (e.g. 486's ran from 25MHz through 100MHz, including the DX4's), but there's such a variety of Athlons, Celerons, Durons, Pentiums, Xeons, Itaniums, and Opterons (to say nothing of the rival PPC/Gx architecture) that I can scarcely keep track of the trademarks, let alone the benchmarks.

But in the meantime, I have developed a breadth and depth of experience - some might call it wisdom - that might enable me to function better at a higher level of job responsibility. I'm still no good supervising people or projects, but I know about the dangers of proprietary lock-in, I understand the importance of security procedures and contingency planning, and I have the maturity to give limited weight to "it would be cool" as a reason for doing something. Not that I'd have much use for that when answering help-desk calls and running off to unjam laser printers.

So it's not that difficult to conceive of me, victim of the Peter Principle in reverse, languishing - unproductive and unhappy - in a low-level position, instead of rising back to the level my competence.