The Gaming Den

Not big problems just, enough to question the universal truthiness of this principle. Names have been left off, but I have seen some examples, the strongest of which I've put below:

1.) It doesn't account for automatic promotions where someone will suddenly seem competent. As much as I hate to say it, oftentimes in military bureaucracy you'll see someone in a particular position not because they even earned it in the traditional sense of the PP but they have a James Buchanan-ish 'eh, we got no one better, promote them anyway' attitude greasing their wheels.. And because of this:

2.) The PP also has an element of elitism to it, that positions higher up in the hierarchy are more difficult than those lower in them. This is the reason why someone who was considered good or even excellent in a lower position 'fails' at a task, because people in the Kool Kidz Treehouse are just that far above the plebs. In all actuality the skills required are different, not necessarily harder. One person I worked next to and got to see climb the ladder before I left the Nav was a really good technician, an awful NCO, but a great officer/organizational person. The PP suggests that being a bad NCO he would've been bad at the 'higher' position but it wasn't the case.

Any job except for completely unskilled labor like mopping floors has a unique variety of skills. Hopefully they'll transfer over up the hierarchy but the fact of the matter is that it often won't. Taking it as gospel blocks any serious analysis of matching people towards their talents--indeed, one of the solutions for the PP was just to directly fill the position from the outside rather than promoting proven people.

Peter's Principle is only one of several parallel promotion problems that takes place in the military, the government and the private sector. Asa result is not a universal law, but a law that does, on occasion apply.

A far more common problem is the use of promotion as a substitution for dismissal. A person may not be desired for whatever reason. Under the circumstances he cannot be easily removed, but he can be promoted to somewhere else where he becomes someone else's problem.

These two effects can be combined for even greater horrors, allowing a person to be promoted well beyond his ability. And god help us if the guy actually WANTS to be promoted ... then we get the POTUS.

i thought military advancement was kinda like bureaucracy/public officials . . you get promoted after x years of being there, no matter what . .

No. There is regular advancement for the lower grades, to a point - though there is always a degree of merit involved - but time-in-grade is only one aspect of promotion in the military. As you get farther up the payscale, there are fewer open positions and competition gets fierce. It's not like the National Army.

Wikipedia entry on the PP wrote: The Peter Principle states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently. It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous [1] treatise which also introduced the "salutary science of hierarchiology."
The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently.

This was obviously formulated with the 1969 US economy in mind and not the 21st century one.

Because here in the 21st century, anything that holds that "members are promoted" is such transparent hogwash that I can't be bothered to keep reading the rest of it.

It's a glib saying, not a law of nature.
At best it's descriptive, and even then only as a broad generalization.

Like most management sayings, look at it and recognize the lesson, then move on.