Probably the Peter Principle. The army does the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

FWIW it's also done for ICs at Google where you have to get promoted to senior by some time or you're let go. I don't know what the story is for managers.

> The army does the same thing.

The military has an up-or-out philosophy, where you must achieve a certain rank after a number of years or get forced out. The major issue with this approach is that promotions in the middle ranks heavily favor seniority. So you might have completed all of your course requirements ahead of time and have glowing PMA from your CO, all in preparation for taking your exam after you meet the time in rank, score the best on the exam, but still get passed up in favor of someone else who has been trying for 4 years to get a promotion because their FMS is higher due to seniority, not capability.

I can see why someone would conflate it with the Peter Principal, but I don't really think it's the same thing. The Peter Principal is predicated upon being good at your job at rank N, but doing poorly at rank N+1.

> FWIW it's also done for ICs at Google where you have to get promoted to senior by some time or you're let go. I don't know what the story is for managers.

Google explicitly changed the policy from expecting that all eng ICs reach L5 (Senior SWE) to expecting that all reach L4 (informally a "solid individual contributor").

I know it's not entirely related, but the informal responsibility you posted is really enlightening.

Would you be ok with sharing your informal take on the other levels?

I was at Google for about 10 years. Here’s my take on the levels.

L3: How well do you do what you’re told?

L4: How independent are you? What’s your individual impact?

L5: How deeply technical are you? How well do you influence others on the team? What do you own?

L6: What’s your reputation in the greater org? How is the product area better because of what you do? Why aren’t you a manager of a 10-person team yet?

L7: How is the company notably different because of you? What technology did you create that most everyone knows about? How have you made a difference in Google’s quarterly revenues for your product area? Why aren’t you a manager of a 30-person group yet?

L8: Why do you have the final say on whether the product area moves forward on any given idea? What books have you published? Which VPs regularly consult with you? Why aren’t you a director of a 200-person org yet?

You can be doing mostly the same job as eng I vs sr and be just fine if you stay in sr forever.

Someone explained recently that you can undermine unions by promoting labor to management and then firing the new managers.

I still don't get how and in whose favor this plays.

Management can't be in the union. So cripple the union by promoting the most effective members into management?

Alternatively, if you want to fire someone and the union blocks it, promote them instead, then fire them later.

> Management can't be in the union.

That's a weird rule. I've never encountered that in European unions.

There's a different gradient of workers union influence for employees at different levels. Traditionally, workers at the bottom of the pyramid have the highest union influence and it decreases as it goes further up.

I've seen it happen when the company appeared to want someone to turn around a sinking ship (project) (or go down with the ship and assume responsibility.) This was for a big project at a big publicly traded company. They gave someone a promotion and an ultra-reach assignment (literally, an assignment so reach that it was effectively unreachable in retrospect.)

The person failed the assignment and went down with the ship. It wasn't a terrible deal because he got a huge layoff payout.