Nobody Is Good at Their Job

And it’s not their fault. It’s the system’s.

Here’s a thought that might ruin your Monday morning. Nobody is good at their job. Not you. Not your boss. Not the person you just promoted last quarter. Nobody.

Before you get offended, hear me out. This isn’t a commentary on talent or work ethic. People are brilliant. People are capable. People are crushing it all over the place. Just… not usually in the role they’re currently sitting in.

Because the modern workplace has a very specific design flaw, and it goes something like this: the moment you get truly, undeniably great at what you do, someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “Congratulations. Now go do something completely different.”

The Science of Shooting Yourself in the Foot

This isn’t just a shower thought. Back in 1969, a Canadian educator named Laurence Peter published a satirical little book called The Peter Principle. His thesis was beautifully blunt: in any hierarchy, people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. You get promoted because you’re great at your current job, not because anyone has evidence you’ll be great at the next one. Then you get stuck.

It was meant to be funny. Turns out it was also accurate.

What they found was, frankly, hilarious if it weren’t so expensive.

The better you were at selling, the worse you were at managing the people who sell.

A top salesperson promoted to manager corresponded to a 7.5% decline in their team’s performance compared to when a weaker salesperson got the job instead. And the companies knew it. They did it anyway, because promotions are how we reward people. It’s the only card in the deck.

The Reward for Being Great Is to Stop

This is the part that gets me. We’ve built entire career structures around a single, absurd premise: the best reward for mastering something is to never do it again.

Your best developer? Promote them to lead. Now they’re in meetings all day and haven’t touched code in six months. Your best designer? Creative director. They spend their time reviewing other people’s work and fighting with timelines. Your best project manager? Director of something. Now they’re doing budgets and quarterly reviews instead of the thing that made them exceptional.

The system doesn’t just allow this. It demands it. Because in most organisations, the only way to earn more money, more influence, or more respect is to climb. And climbing means leaving the ground floor where all the actual work happens.

The Plot Twist Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets interesting. Every now and then, someone goes the other direction. Someone who’s been promoted up the chain voluntarily steps back. Takes a role a level or two below where their career trajectory says they “should” be. And something wonderful happens.

They absolutely destroy it. In the best possible way.

Not because the work is beneath them. Not because they’re coasting. But because they’re finally operating with headroom. They have the strategic awareness of someone who’s seen the bigger picture, combined with the tactical skill of someone who actually does the work. They’re not stretching. They’re not surviving. They’re thriving.

That’s insane.

What If Down Is the New Up?

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset basically nailed this over a century ago when he wrote that all public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, since they’ve been promoted until they turned incompetent. He was being cheeky, but he was also onto something.

What if the bravest career move isn’t chasing the next title? What if it’s choosing mastery over status? What if organisations built reward systems (pay, recognition, influence) that let people stay planted in the work they’re best at, rather than forcing them to abandon it in exchange for a fancier email signature?

Some companies are starting to figure this out. Dual career tracks. Technical fellow programs. Staff-level individual contributor paths that pay as well as management. It’s happening. Slowly. But the default for most of the working world is still the same old escalator: up, up, up, and then… confusion.

The Uncomfortable Punchline

So nobody is good at their job. Not because we lack talent, but because we’ve designed a system that treats every job as a waiting room for the next one. The moment you’re finally good enough to be dangerous, you’re handed a new set of responsibilities you’ve never practiced and told to figure it out.

Meanwhile, the job you just left? It gets filled by someone who hasn’t mastered it yet. And the cycle continues. A perfectly engineered machine for ensuring that at any given moment, almost everyone is either learning a role they’re not ready for or has already been pulled away from one they’d mastered.

If that sounds bleak, it’s not meant to be. It’s actually an opportunity. For the people brave enough to say “I’m good right here.” For the organisations smart enough to let them stay. And for anyone who’s ever felt the quiet, underrated joy of being genuinely, deeply, unreasonably good at something.