The cursor blinks at 103 beats per minute, or at least it feels that way as Sarah reaches across my desk to seize my mouse. My neck gives a sharp, involuntary pop-I cracked it too hard this morning while staring at the fluorescent lights of the library-and the sudden spike of pain matches the irritation of seeing her highlight line 43 of my pull request. We are supposed to be discussing my career trajectory. We are supposed to be talking about how I can lead the next phase of the project. Instead, Sarah, who was the most brilliant systems architect this firm had seen in 13 years before they handed her a title and a team, is currently rewriting a variable name because she doesn’t like the cadence of the syllables. She is a virtuoso playing the wrong instrument. She is an expert who has been promoted into a state of profound, twitchy incompetence.
The Naked Paradox
This is the Promotion Paradox in its most naked form. We take the people who are the absolute best at ‘doing’ and, as a reward, we tell them they can never ‘do’ again. Instead, they must ‘oversee,’ a verb that most technical experts interpret as ‘doing the work of five people through the jittery remote control of other people’s hands.’
It is a systemic failure that assumes the skills required to talk to a compiler or a lathe are the same skills required to talk to a frustrated human being at 3 o’clock on a Tuesday. They are not. In fact, they are often diametrically opposed.
The Category Error: Miller’s Library
In my 23 months working as a prison librarian before this corporate stint, I saw this play out in a much more visceral arena. We had an inmate, let’s call him Miller, who was a master of the internal logistics of the stacks. He could categorize 503 returns in his sleep. He knew where every stray volume of the penal code was hidden. Naturally, the administration decided he should be the ‘lead clerk,’ responsible for managing the other 13 inmates who worked the desk.
Within 3 weeks, the library was a war zone. Miller didn’t know how to de-escalate a conflict over a late copy of a thriller; he only knew how to organize the thriller. He would scream about decimal points while two men were trading blows over a chair.
– The Master of Objects
He was a master of objects, forced to be a master of souls, and he failed because the promotion wasn’t a growth opportunity-it was a category error.
[The Peter Principle isn’t a glitch; it is the blueprint of modern hierarchy.]
Insight visualization: Structural Law
We treat the management track as the only ladder worth climbing. If you are a world-class engineer, the only way to get a raise that ends in 3 zeros is to stop being an engineer. You are forced to trade your scalpel for a baton, even if you have no sense of rhythm.
The Phantom Limb Sensation
This creates a vacuum at the heart of the organization. The top performers are removed from the front lines, and the people remaining on the front lines are led by someone who is mourning the loss of their own craft. Sarah isn’t being a jerk when she grabs my mouse; she is experiencing a phantom limb sensation. she misses the code. She misses the clarity of a logic gate. She is trying to find her way back to the 103 percent certainty she used to feel before her day was filled with 1-on-1s and conflict resolution.
When an expert becomes a terrible manager, they don’t just fail at their new job; they poison the old one. They micromanage because they can’t help themselves. They judge their subordinates’ work against their own peak performance, forgetting that it took them 13 years to reach that level of intuition.
The team becomes demotivated because they feel like extensions of the manager’s keyboard rather than autonomous professionals. The organizational knowledge isn’t being leveraged; it’s being hoarded and weaponized.
The Alternative: Expanding the Craft
There is a different way to think about this, a model where the expert remains the expert, and leadership is seen as a complementary, rather than a superior, craft. When you look at someone like Werth Builders, you see the opposite of this fractured logic.
Management, in that context, isn’t a reward for quitting the craft; it’s the natural expansion of the craft itself.
The Cost of Misplaced Brilliance
I think back to Miller in the library. He should have been given a title that reflected his peerless organizational skill-perhaps ‘Chief Archivist’-with a salary to match. He should have been allowed to stay in the stacks. Instead, the system demanded he sit in an office he hated, managing people he didn’t understand. We do this to our developers, our surgeons, our teachers, and our designers. We take the 43 percent of their brain that is brilliant and we lobotomize it with a spreadsheet.
Sarah is currently explaining to me why my choice of a boolean flag is ‘sub-optimal,’ her voice rising with a frantic kind of passion. I realize then that she isn’t trying to help me. She is trying to save herself from the boredom of her own calendar. She is drowning in meetings and she has reached for my code like a life raft.
The irony is that if I do my job well-if I am the 1 in 83 who truly masters this technical stack-the company will likely try to ‘reward’ me by making me just like her. They will offer me a desk and a title and a team of 13 juniors, and they will expect me to be happy about it. They will expect me to stop doing the thing I love so that I can spend my days watching other people do it slightly worse than I would. It is a bizarre form of professional cannibalism. We eat our experts to feed our hierarchies.
The Hierarchy’s Diet
Mastery
The thing you love.
The Trade
Scalpel for Baton.
Hierarchy
Feeds itself.
We need to stop viewing management as a promotion and start viewing it as a career change. If a star pitcher is asked to become the coach, everyone recognizes that his role has fundamentally shifted. He doesn’t go out to the mound during the 3rd inning to throw the ball for the rookie.
The Cost of Silence
The true cost of a bad manager is the silence of the experts who give up.
– Hierarchy Audit
As Sarah finally lets go of my mouse and leans back, she looks exhausted. There are 3 empty coffee cups on her desk. She hasn’t built anything in months, and it shows in the way she holds her shoulders. She is a master builder who has been told she can only be a supervisor. I want to tell her about Miller. I want to tell her that it’s okay to just want to be the best at the thing. But the hierarchy doesn’t allow for that. In this office, you either climb until you reach your level of incompetence, or you stay at the bottom and get managed by someone who did.
Team Morale vs. Code Quality Index
73% Optimality Achieved
I look at the line of code she changed. It’s technically better, I suppose. But the project is 43 days behind schedule, and the team’s morale is at an all-time low. We have the best-named variables in the industry, and we are absolutely miserable. I think about the 1503 hours I’ve spent learning this craft, and I wonder if the goal is actually to get so good that I never have to do it again. It’s a hollow prize.
I’d rather be the guy in the stacks, knowing exactly where the books are, than the man in the office wondering why everyone is fighting. We have to start valuing the master as much as we value the manager, or we will continue to be a society of brilliant people led by those who forgot how to shine.