---
title: "Looking at The Peter Principle, Dilbert Principle, and Parkinson’s Law"
date: 2012-02-15
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/02/15/the-peter-principle-dilbert-principle-and-parkinsons-law/
---
# Looking at The Peter Principle, Dilbert Principle, and Parkinson’s Law
## The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." In other words, employees who perform their roles with competence are promoted into successively higher levels until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. There they remain.

For example, let's say you are a brilliant programmer. You spend your days coding with amazing efficiency and prowess. After a couple of years, you're promoted to lead programmer, and then promoted to team manager. You may have no interest in managing other programmers, but it's the reward for your competence. There you sit -- you have risen to a level of incompetence. Your technical skills lie dormant while you fill your day with one-on-one meetings, department strategy meetings, planning meetings, budgets, and reports.

## The Dilbert Principle

The Dilbert Principle is related to the Peter Principle, but the Dilbert Principle states that

> "companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing."

In contrast to the Peter Principle, which seems to promote competent employees out of good faith (though it works toward the employees' detriment), Dilbert sees management as a place to stuff the incompetent so they are no longer blocking the productive workflow of the company.

The Dilbert Principle assumes that " the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder." Those in management don't actually do anything to move forward the work.

You can see the Dilbert principle play out in *The Office*, *Office Space*, and other parodies of corporate culture. (See [The Dilbert Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_Principle).)