Peter Principle Programming

There’s a famous management concept called “The Peter Principle” which I’ve always liked. It says that people will get promoted to the level of their incompetence. In other words, if a person is good at their job they get promoted. However, they will eventually reach a point where they are no longer good at their job, promotion will cease, and they will be stuck at that level being incompetent for the rest of their career.

I’m sure it didn’t happen to me.

Anyhoo.. I think that I may be turning into a “Peter Principle Programmer” of late. I’ve managed to create some software that has behaviours that I just don’t understand. I’ve got a bug in my latest version of the Air Quality sensor which is exhibiting behaviour that is just not possible.

Actually, having thought about it properly though, I reckon that lots of people start out in this position. One of the nasty things about learning to code is making something and having no idea what it is doing. The trick when writing code is, for me, always about trying to make it as simple as possible to understand, so that when it goes wrong you have a chance of getting your head around what is happening.