Amerika

When you are a yeoman farmer, your bosses are the wind, rain, sun, seeds, and earth. You must find a way to have your plants and animals produce the output that you need.

However when you leave the farm, move into the city, and take a regular job, your bosses are the people above you in a hierarchy based on promotions and education instead of real-world results.

If your boss tells you to do a thing, and you do it, but it produces no bottom line for the business or good for anything else, no one may suffer consequences, so long as the necessary stuff also gets done.

Since most jobs require a few hours a day of actual work, the rest of your time gets filled with make-work, meetings, trainings, emails, paperwork, and other things which ultimately produce nothing.

However, you must still keep your bossy happy by maintaining appearances, and you must do the same with your coworkers, so you daily waste your irreplaceable time — you are dying slowly as you read this — on “the optics.”

Even worse, your boss is likely to be someone who was promoted to keep him or her in a place where they can do minimal damage, a practice called the Peter Principle:

The Peter Principle theorizes that employees in most organizational hierarchies automatically rise through promotion to higher positions. However, competent employees will be promoted, but will ultimately assume positions for which they are incompetent.

According to the Peter Principle, competence is rewarded with promotion because competence, in the form of employee output, is noticeable, and recognized. However, once an employee reaches a position in which they are incompetent, they are no longer evaluated based on their output

The Peter Principle is the inverse of the Dilbert Principle, an idea coined by the cartoonist Scott Adams for the comic strip Dilbert. This rule states that companies tend to promote their least-competent employees to management roles where they are least likely to interfere with production. Both rules explain the presence of incompetent people in management positions but use different explanations.

If jobs promoted exclusively by ability, management would be an entirely separate track to normal work, but most people get promoted into management because they made their bosses happy. They now take on an entirely different job with a different skillset and tend to muck it up.

Others are MBAs hired because they did well in education, which narrows reality to memorization and tests and promotes those who are good at taking tests and writing papers. These skills do not always translate into being good at applying the subject matter in the far more complex, obscure, and messy world of reality.

As it turns out, jobs are shallow hierarchies based not on competence, but having done what the boss said to do:

In this framework, the more unequal a competition, the deeper it is. In deeper competitions, then, the competitors are more stratified by their skill and status.

While humans have norms and structures to promote parity and exciting competitions, other animals do not.

Competitive interactions in human society, including university rankings and social hierarchies within high school friend groups, land between sports and animal competitions in terms of depth.

Deeper hierarchies are based on who the person is and what their essential abilities — intelligence, perception, organization, gumption — are. These tend to promote people who may know nothing of the subject matter and therefore have to learn, but are better at the raw skills that leadership requires.

Tags: antiwork, deep hierarchy, dilbert principle, hierarchy, peter principle, shallow hierarchy