# Putt's Law

## Statement
Putt's Law observes a persistent divide in technology organizations: the people who possess deep technical understanding rarely control resource and staffing decisions, while the people who hold decision-making authority rarely understand the technology at the level required to evaluate those decisions. This gap between expertise and authority produces systematic misalignment in technical organizations.

## Origin
The principle appears in "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat," published in 1981, which drew on observations of corporate technology departments. The author, writing under the name Putt, catalogued the ways in which organizational hierarchy in engineering firms separates technical practitioners from the managers who direct their work. The insight resonated with engineers who recognized the pattern in their own companies and became part of the informal canon of technology management commentary.

## Software Implications
The most visible manifestation occurs when a director or VP without recent hands-on experience approves or rejects an architectural proposal. The manager evaluates the plan against budget, headcount, and political considerations, while the engineers evaluate it against technical soundness. When these perspectives conflict, the manager's authority typically prevails, even when the technical assessment is more relevant to the outcome.

Career path structures in many companies create this divide deliberately. A senior engineer who excels at system design faces a promotion ceiling unless they move into management, where the required skills shift from technical analysis to people management, budget ownership, and stakeholder navigation. Once promoted, the new manager's technical skills decay rapidly as their calendar fills with meetings. Within two years, the person who was the team's deepest technical expert may struggle to review a pull request in the system they originally designed.

Companies that offer dual-track career ladders, where individual contributors can advance to staff, principal, or distinguished engineer roles with compensation and influence equivalent to management, partially address this problem. Google, for instance, maintains a technical ladder that runs parallel to the management ladder through L8 and above, giving senior technologists a reason to stay hands-on rather than migrating into administration.

## Practical Guidance
- Establish a parallel individual-contributor career track with compensation and organizational influence comparable to the management track.
- Include senior technical staff in planning and budget decisions as advisors with real authority, not as afterthoughts.
- Rotate managers through hands-on technical work periodically to keep their understanding current.
- Evaluate management candidates for technical judgment as well as people skills.

## Common Misreadings
Putt's Law should not be read as an argument that managers must be former engineers with current coding skills. Many effective engineering managers bring complementary strengths in communication, strategy, and organizational design. The law warns about the specific risk of decision-makers who lack sufficient technical context to evaluate the consequences of their decisions, not about managers who lack a computer science degree.

Another misreading treats the law as inevitable. Organizations can and do bridge the expertise-authority gap through technical program management, architecture review boards, and principal engineer roles that carry decision-making weight without requiring a people-management portfolio.

## Interactions
Putt's Law deepens the Peter Principle's effect, because technically excellent contributors who are promoted into management lose their expertise, fulfilling both patterns simultaneously. It amplifies the Bus Factor, since the people who understand the system best are often not the people authorizing its maintenance. Price's Law identifies the rare individuals who bridge both domains: the small minority who combine deep technical skill with organizational influence. Conway's Law operates through the lens of Putt's Law when technically uninformed managers draw org-chart boundaries that produce awkward architectural seams.

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*Based on: Putt, "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat" (Wiley, 1981)*
