[swaits]

This is 100% how it works at Amazon. It is said you have to do the job (of Principal Engineer) to get promoted. But most Principal Engineers are doing a different job than the job you have to do to become one yourself. Signed, PE@Amazon for 9 years.

[conception]

I think it’s how it works everywhere. People see who’s good at their job and promote them to manager; an entirely different job though people often think it needs the same skill set.

[the_af]

But doesn't this contradict the bit where they argue "to be promoted to X, you must have already been acting like X in practice"?

[yathaid]

A part of the job is only enabled when you get the Principal label. Unlike almost all other transitions, you only prove that you can do the role when given the opportunities. The hardest part about this transition is that you are doing two almost orthogonal roles - Sr. SDE / Tech Lead and the principal parts. It is very easy to not show impact in the former while chasing the latter.

[the_af]

A part of the job that is completely different to what you've been doing, only you were promoted to it because of what you've been doing?

Isn't this like a recipe for the Peter Principle?

    "The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another"

[yathaid]

Nobody performs as the CEO until they are given the CEO title. If the Peter principle was true 100% of the time, we wouldn't have any successful CEOs ever. Which is clearly not the case.

[the_af]

Some CEOs do, some don't. Some are successful, some are middling, some are shameful failures or frauds.

However, none of this has much to do with what I said: isn't promoting someone for things they would have to stop doing (as in TFA) a recipe for the Peter principle?

At some point, we have to understand articles and blog posts like the one we're discussing are mostly fluff; an ad for the person writing them. They are self-promotion, there's not much sense in trying to extract valuable lessons from them.

----

I thought of another analogy:

"You're an excellent marksman and a sniper, therefore we promote you to... general of the army!"

But, you could argue, maybe the sniper was already directing strategy, and that's why he got promoted? Nope, TFA is clear about this:

    "To get to principal, you need to put yourself on the critical path. To be effective as a principal and go beyond it, you need to actively remove yourself from it"

So whatever the sniper was doing that got him promoted to general, he must now stop doing it.