# Dilbert Principle

## Statement
The Dilbert Principle satirizes a corporate tendency to promote the least competent employees into management, where their capacity to do damage is limited by their distance from hands-on work. Unlike the Peter Principle, which describes accidental promotion past one's competence, the Dilbert Principle describes a deliberate or semi-conscious strategy of containment through elevation.

## Origin
Cartoonist Scott Adams formulated this principle in his 1996 book "The Dilbert Principle," drawing on thousands of reader submissions about dysfunctional workplaces. Adams observed that many corporations had institutionalized a practice of removing poor performers from technical roles where they caused visible damage and relocating them to management positions where their incompetence was less immediately apparent. The book became a bestseller by naming a pattern that working engineers recognized from their own experience.

## Software Implications
In technology companies, the Dilbert Principle manifests when an engineer who writes fragile code, misses deadlines, and alienates teammates is promoted to a management or coordination role. The reasoning, whether explicit or implicit, is that removing this person from the codebase eliminates a source of bugs and conflict, while their new management responsibilities are diffuse enough that the damage they cause is harder to measure. The team's code quality may improve in the short term, but the newly minted manager now makes hiring decisions, sets priorities, and conducts performance reviews, potentially compounding the harm over time.

A subtler variant occurs when technically weak but politically skilled engineers gravitate toward roles that control the work of others: scrum masters, project managers, and technical program managers. These roles carry significant influence over what gets built and in what order, yet they rarely require the holder to demonstrate technical competence in the domain they oversee. The result is planning decisions that prioritize politically expedient features over technically necessary ones.

The principle also describes a failure mode of organizational design. When a company lacks a rigorous management selection process, the people who end up in leadership roles are those who campaign for them most aggressively, not those who would be most effective. Aggression and political skill correlate poorly with engineering judgment.

## Practical Guidance
- Treat management selection as a distinct hiring process with its own criteria, not as a reward for tenure or a solution for a performance problem.
- Evaluate candidates for leadership roles on conflict resolution, delegation, and strategic thinking through structured interviews, not anecdotal impressions.
- Address poor technical performance directly through feedback and improvement plans rather than sidestepping it through promotion.
- Create lateral movement opportunities that let people find roles suited to their strengths without defaulting to management.

## Common Misreadings
The Dilbert Principle is satire, not a rigorously validated organizational theory. While many engineers recognize the pattern, it does not describe every organization or every promotion. Applying it as a blanket assumption about all managers is cynical and counterproductive. Many managers are competent professionals who chose leadership deliberately and execute it well.

The principle also does not imply that management is inherently less valuable than technical work. The insight is specifically about using management as a destination for incompetence, not about management itself.

## Interactions
The Dilbert Principle is the dark companion to the Peter Principle: the Peter Principle describes reaching incompetence accidentally through merit-based promotion, while the Dilbert Principle describes reaching it through intentional removal of problem employees. Both patterns reduce the quality of management decisions, which Putt's Law notes are already made by people who may lack technical depth. Price's Law suggests that the competent core of an organization will continue producing output regardless of management quality, but their effectiveness will be constrained by poor decisions from above. Bus Factor worsens when incompetent managers fail to invest in knowledge sharing because they do not understand the technical risks.

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*Based on: Adams, "The Dilbert Principle" (HarperBusiness, 1996)*
