I considered my experience with doctors and with programmers and middle managers (plus there was the Apple abuse story mulling through my head) and came up with that.
I'm a programmer and I'm an average #2.
#3s in programming are kind of different. Incompetents get weeded out quickly from true programming jobs and punted up to management likely where they become part of the Middle Management Machiavelli perpetual war.
#3s express themselves as moderate technical competence, a typical one would be someone that gets to declare greenfield to the specific stuff they have enough ability to do, gain sheen of competence, and then aggressively assume the role of "expert" based, since to management they "produced".
Next thing you know, some guy that could rapidly stand up a PHP site is in technical leadership and pushing for PHP to serve as a big data platform because it is (rolls another dice to determine buzzword) "agile".
Then they have as much or more organizational pull as a legit #4 and your organization is in TROUBLE.
I'm a programmer and I'm an average #2.
#3s in programming are kind of different. Incompetents get weeded out quickly from true programming jobs and punted up to management likely where they become part of the Middle Management Machiavelli perpetual war.
#3s express themselves as moderate technical competence, a typical one would be someone that gets to declare greenfield to the specific stuff they have enough ability to do, gain sheen of competence, and then aggressively assume the role of "expert" based, since to management they "produced".
Next thing you know, some guy that could rapidly stand up a PHP site is in technical leadership and pushing for PHP to serve as a big data platform because it is (rolls another dice to determine buzzword) "agile".
Then they have as much or more organizational pull as a legit #4 and your organization is in TROUBLE.