The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving. Anya’s screen is split into three panels: a calendar clogged with meetings colored in shades of institutional despair, an email inbox boasting 43 unread messages, and a project management tool. The top ticket, the one demanding her immediate attention, is titled, “URGENT: Coffee Maker Filter Replacement Protocol.” Someone has tagged it as a high-priority blocker. She hasn’t written a line of production code in 153 days.

This isn’t a fall from grace. It’s an ascension. Six months ago, Anya was the one you went to when the database deadlocked under load, when a recursive function was eating memory for breakfast. She didn’t just fix things; she understood the soul of the system, the elegant, fragile logic holding it all together. She was, by every metric, the best engineer on a team of 13. So, they promoted her. They gave her a team, a budget, and the responsibility for approving vacation requests.

The Peter Principle, Reconsidered

We call this the Peter Principle-the idea that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. We say it with a knowing smirk, as if it’s some unavoidable law of nature, like gravity or entropy. But it’s not. What’s happening to Anya isn’t an accident or an inevitability. It’s a feature. It is the output of a system that has only one tool-a ladder-to reward value. We see an expert craftsman and, with the best intentions, we hand them a clipboard and a title, effectively confiscating the tools that made them valuable in the first place. We promote people out of their competence because we have no other vocabulary for ‘thank you’ or ‘we value you.’

I’ve made this exact mistake. I once managed a graphic designer, a quiet genius who could communicate an entire strategic vision in a single icon. His work was sublime. So, when a ‘Lead Designer’ role opened up, I championed him for it. It seemed like the obvious, righteous thing to do. He got the job. And for the next year, I watched the spark drain from his eyes. He spent his days in brand synergy meetings, mediating disputes about font choices, and filling out performance reviews. He wasn’t designing; he was managing the conditions for design. We lost our best designer and gained a stressed, mediocre manager who quit 13 months later to take a junior design role at a smaller company. I thought I was rewarding him. What I actually did was punish him for his talent.

Organizational Self-Harm

It’s a spectacular act of organizational self-harm. We identify our most effective individual contributors and then we neutralize them, turning them into administrative hubs. We take the person who can solve the puzzle and make them the person who orders more puzzles.

I find it’s often useful to use slightly absurd analogies to shed light on our own absurdities, though many business writers overdo it. Take someone like Ruby L.-A. Ruby is an aquarium maintenance diver. Her job is to descend into a 353,000-gallon saltwater tank and ensure the delicate coral ecosystem remains stable. She monitors water chemistry, inspects the filtration systems, and occasionally nudges a curious moray eel away from the acrylic. She is an expert in a complex, living system. Her knowledge is deep, specific, and physical. How would you promote Ruby? Make her manager of the diving team? Now, instead of maintaining the reef, she’s creating schedules, approving equipment purchase orders, and handling HR complaints. You’ve taken your best diver out of the water. The reef suffers, and Ruby now hates her job. Would that be a sensible way to run an aquarium? Of course not. The aquarium’s management understands that Ruby’s highest value is realized when she is 23 feet underwater.

They find other ways to reward her. A higher salary. More autonomy. A budget for experimental coral cultivation. They recently did a full upgrade of their monitoring infrastructure, a project costing $23,373. They consulted Ruby on where the cameras should go to best observe the behavior of the nocturnal species. The new system uses a series of networked poe cameras that draw power from the same cable that transmits the data, simplifying the installation in the complex, wet environment. Ruby provided the crucial expertise on placement, but she didn’t run the project. She didn’t manage the budget. She didn’t deal with the vendor. Her expertise was harvested, respected, and then she was allowed to get back to the work only she could do. Her success isn’t measured by how many people report to her, but by the vibrancy of the ecosystem she maintains.

Stagnation or Amputation?

We have this figured out for divers and chefs and surgeons. We understand that their expertise is the asset, and their career progression should involve deepening that expertise, not abandoning it. Yet, in the technology and creative fields, we can’t seem to shake this monolithic idea of the corporate ladder. We have engineers who want nothing more than to build elegant, scalable systems, and we force them to become managers to feel successful. We create a false dichotomy: either stay an individual contributor and cap your career, or become a manager and abandon the craft that you love. It’s a choice between stagnation and amputation.

There are, of course, brilliant engineers who become brilliant managers. But they are the exception, and they succeed because they genuinely want to shift their craft from building systems to building teams. That is a completely different skill set. It’s like a novelist becoming a publisher. Some can do it, but the desire must be there. We, however, operate as if it’s the default path, the only path.

The Dual Ladder Alternative

What’s the alternative? A dual ladder system, for one. A technical track that allows an engineer to reach the same level of seniority, compensation, and influence as a director or VP, but without ever managing a single person. A path where the title ‘Principal Engineer’ or ‘Fellow’ carries as much weight as ‘Senior Manager.’ Some companies pay lip service to this, but in practice, the management track almost always has the higher ceiling for influence and pay. Until we fix that, we will continue to strip-mine our talent, rewarding our best players by sending them to the bench.

The system is broken, and it’s broken because we are lazy. It is easier to maintain a single, simple hierarchy than it is to build a more complex, more human-centric organization that recognizes and rewards different kinds of value in different ways.

Anya minimizes the coffee maker ticket. Her calendar reminds her of a one-on-one in 3 minutes. She has just enough time to open a side project she’s been toying with, a small piece of code that elegantly solves a problem that has been bothering her for weeks. For a moment, her fingers fly across the keyboard. The logic flows. The world outside the editor melts away. It’s the first time she’s felt competent all day.