In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).
With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:
1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).
3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.
4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.
5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
It's both.
You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.
The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.
> demonstrating performance at your boss's level
To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.
It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)
It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.
And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.
I've seen a couple of patterns:
1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.
2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.
Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted
If you're an engineering IC, and your boss is a manager with 4 other ICs, your boss's goals are twofold: get at least 5 ICs worth of results from the team, and managing people.
So to do what you and TFA suggest literally you can either:
- Do 5 ICs worth of work
- Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
I've seen coworkers try to manage their peers, aiming for a promotion. To say the least it harms team unity.
I only managed to do the 2nd once when I was thrown into a project with an absentee manager and doubly-booked half-committed members who were actually happy for someone to organize the work. Those sorts of situations are rare. Or maybe that's the unstated qualification.
And: Do 5x the amount of work, well...
Maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough here, but I need some examples of how this is generally achievable. Maybe this was specifically _not_ about the IC-manager divide, and more like managers and manager-managers?
What I'd more generally expect is for a manager to explicitly put you in charge of a small, short term project with one or two other people and see how it goes: can everyone contribute, did you achieve results, were you transparent, how did you interact with the other members, etc.
This is a good question. I compressed too much: instead of "performance at your boss's level" I really meant, "helping to achieve your boss's goals".
If you're an engineering IC in a team of 5, what are your boss's goals? It's usually things like: hit your deadlines, avoid production bug catastrophes, and maybe add features that make the sales people happy.
How can your boss achieve those goals? I have a few ideas:
a) Processes: Introduce or refine processes for the team to ensure high-quality code or to gain efficiencies.
b) Mentoring: Help members of the team to function at their highest level.
c) Clearing Obstacles: Coordinate with other teams so they don't slow you down. E.g., make sure teams you depend on are on schedule, and if not, adapt and adjust.
But this is just an example. I think the easiest thing to do is ask your boss what their goals are. What does success look like to them? Once you know that, you might be able to come up with ways of helping that they might not have thought of.
This sounds like advice for how to be promoted to a specific level -- the first point where awareness of things beyond yourself is required (somewhere around the Senior or Staff level for ICs, depending on your company).
Generally everyone in a team should be working towards some shared goal, there's no level at which you can be a chaos agent and not serve some higher purpose. The difference at this level transition is that you realise that for yourself -- someone doesn't need to remind you of the goal and nudge you back on course. That same realisation is not going to cut it at higher levels.
For me the general version of this advice is not something you can just tell the person who's being promoted, it's collective advice, for them, their manager, their tech lead: everyone needs to agree that this person needs to be given more rope, they need to do something useful with that (i.e. not hang themselves with it), the people around them need to watch out for when they start tying a noose and help them untie it (already regretting this analogy), and that's how you get promoted.
The rope takes different forms for different levels. I'll use the level scale I'm familiar with, starting with a newly graduated engineer at L3:
- L3 -> L4. You help decide how to build the feature.
- L4 -> L5. You help decide what features are worth building, and are trusted to maintain them.
- L5 -> L6. You help shape the work and ongoing maintenance of ~10 people's work (what products are worth building and how), over a time horizon of 6 months to a year.
- L6 -> L7. ~50 people's work, 1-2 years.
- L7 -> L8. ~200 people's work, 2-5 years.
- L8 -> L9. Things start to get fuzzy. The pattern suggests that you have a hand in ~1000 people's work, which is possible to do in the moment, but rare. There's two ways I can think of: you're either a world expert in your field, or you have set the technical strategy well for your organisation as it grew to this size.
This is just based on my experience, working largely on infrastructure teams both in big tech and in start ups as both an IC and a manager (currently an IC).
I think those are good examples. I think part of the confusion is that most of those are typical responsibilities of e.g. senior level IC work, so "performance at your boss's level" looks more or less the same as "performance at your current IC level".
I'd say it's about doing things at the next level to show you're ready for that level. So for moving from a Sr to a Staff position might involve doing more mentoring of the team, showing that you are using your knowledge to improve the efficiency of both your team and other teams, etc.
> Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
Anecdotically, a coworken in my group started, on his own initiative, to “play manager” in out team, because he wanted to “help us all”. Of course he just wanted to ascend the ladder. That backfired instantly and spectacularly. I would never act with any authority if it was not very clearly delegated by my team, or my superior; and even then I would walk like in thin ice for the first 6 months
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
So technically, it is using your past experience to prove that you are operating at the next level
> Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
How ridiculous the opposite sounds: You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level. You'd get laughed out of the room. But the company has this exact deal in reverse.
> > Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
My current company used to work this way, but they moved to a "needs-based" promo process. You can be promoted to L5 if your manager can justify the need for an L5.
Which ends up making promotions significantly harder to come by. It's near impossible to justify the need for an L5 role when you already have L4s doing the work. No matter how far outside their level competencies a person works, that work becomes L4 work... because an L4 is successfully performing it.
I'm in this exact situation described in the two comments above.
I explained to my manager that the project I have been working on has developed a lot since the last two years and if he would hire a replacement he would be looking at a senior person, not a junior. He agrees but he gets rejected when he made the case to his boss. My performance reviews have been above expectations.
His boss claimed that it would not be fair to other people that stayed in the position for a similar amount of time before getting a promotion, essentially ignoring my exceptional performance.
My company, for e.g. is fairly flat, and my boss is more or less aware of everyone’s contributions in my team, he often works with them directly.
I also work with my report’s reports directly and am fairly aware of their work.
Despite this, some engineers, to my surprise, act as we have a strict hierarchy and try to reach to me through their managers.
From the sounds of your description, there are a few possibilities:
1. Your boss’s boss is aware of your work. She is also aware of others’ and she does not think that yours particularly stand out and she is willing to risk your departure. In this case, you would need to really look at this objectively. Are you really exceptional? Why does not she think so if that’s the case? Is there someone else who are also great (or giving that impression) that you are not aware?
2. She does not know you very well. If so, why is this the case? Does she not know anyone, or are you keeping your work to yourself? I’ve definitely been in this situation, despite architecting our whole core systems, years later I found nobody other than my fellow engineers knew. Was a hard-earned lesson for me, you need to start speaking about your work outside of your 1-1s, but not in a promotional way. By frequently offering your hard-earned wisdom where it is helpful.
3. She is not interested in knowing anyone. She will manage her team at a high level and she either won’t promote anyone until she is forced to (e.g. you are leaving otherwise), or when she is given a budget and asked for it, which she will then ask for recommendations, your chances than unlikely to be proportional to your work but be circumstantial. If this is the case, you should start interviewing.
One thing that I've seen implemented to prevent that is to have the pay bands for level N and N+1 overlap. So in the time that you're doing "next level" work, you're expecting to be at the top of your current pay band, and then the promotion doesn't automatically give you a big pay raise, but it unlocks a pay band that you can go up in.
This works if performing at the top of your current level equates to performing at the bottom of the next level. That said, there's a problem where sometimes a "promotion" is really a new role, meaning to perform at the next level, you have to kind of not perform well at the current level.
It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job:
1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help)
2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates)
3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)
It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation.
It's a good deal if you deserve the promo. Giving someone the opportunity to take on projects at the next level and having them not deliver can be enormously expensive. The higher the level, the more expensive it is.
Possibly. It's the only way it actually works though, because of the Peter Priciple.
Imagine the other way - you have peopel dong a role, and the people who do the best job at that role get promoted to the next one. Some of them will be good and the new role, some of them won't. The ones who are good will carry on getting promoted. The ones who aren't will get stuck in that role. The problem is that everyone rises to a point at which they can't do the job, and every role is filled by someone who has been promoted one step too far.
In a healthy structure, it should be a halfway house - you shouldn't have to be doing the whole job that you're trying to get promoted to, you should be doing enough bits and pieces of it that you demonstrate that you CAN do it. That way the company has information that they're not promoting you to a position of incompetence.
How exactly do you suggest it should work, then? A timer starts and when it runs out you get promoted and everyone just hopes you didn't just get moved up above your level of competence?
I suppose it balances in the end, though. If you could make more money elsewhere you'd go elsewhere, so the whole reason you are willing to accept being underpaid through the transitionary phase is because you realize that you will be overpaid afterwards.
This is premised on promotions and other work rewards having any kind of rational basis or connection to the work.
It could simply be that spending time with your boss makes them know and like you more, and people tend to reward people they know and like, making up some post hoc rationalization about performance or whatever to justify it.
No one wants to think of themselves like this, though, so they would never admit, even to themselves, that this is what's going on, but I suspect for most people it's the actual reality.
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
It can not be farther from the truth.
The best way to stay in the bottom is to work hard, to focus on work so that others have time to focus on advertising themselves, take credit of your good work and backstab you for everything else, befriend and lick the shoes strategically -even develop bed skills, for some- while you isolate yourself by sweating and believing everyone will understand or care about how you optimized that for loop.
Cynicism is a seductive drug. It makes you feel good because you don't have to do anything--the game is rigged, so why bother trying? But like all drugs it is ultimately self-sabotaging.
Careers are like love: you have to risk heartbreak or you'll never experience joy.
I don't think there's a one size fits all here. If you don't go out of your comfort zone and "do more" you may never get a promotion because you're seen as average. But it's also true that if you work hard and constantly deliver you may still never get the promotion because you're seen as critical where you are.
You might be disappointed either way. Like any recipe, there are many ingredients needed to pull it off. Delivering results, solving your boss' or boss' boss problems, doing it visibly, having support from above, doing it at the right time, etc. all contribute.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
> 2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
That's not evidence for 1. At least you haven't explained a reason why it would be.
Ah, the classic "work even harder and do things you're not paid for with zero guarantee that someone will appreciate what you're doing while the company reaps the benefits". What a novel thought, I am so glad I clicked the article, especially since the author isn't even speaking from experience so he has nothing to back up his blogpost with.
Listen, you don't have to do this and are free to disagree.
However, this method has worked and will continue to work. Lots of people are fine just doing their shift and leaving, that's ok. Some people are not satisfied with that and want more, and there are strategies to do more work and get paid to do so.
Yes, you must do more than average to get promoted.
But also yes, if you do more and more and don't get the rewards you want, don't just continue. Either scale back again, or modify your strategy, or apply this strategy elsewhere.
I'm seeing widely opposing takes here; my experience is that the advice is correct depending on where you are. I've worked in places where someone who works 130% is seen as company's profit. But I'm currently at a place where making an extra effort is definitely rewarded with promotions.
I've literally never gotten a promotion without taking on the additional responsibilities first. I wouldn't expect a promotion for just doing time at a company like a prison sentence. If they didn't promote me then I would have immediately moved on.
Exactly, working harder doesn’t mean putting in extra hours. It means taking on projects with larger scope, impact and ambiguity during your normal working hours
Not to diminish your skepticism, but your reply comes off jaded in a way that might be hurting you. The author's suggestion for employees seeking promotion is to operate on a higher level than they're asked to and keep operating in that fashion for a sustained window of time. Show growth, in other words.
Some workplaces see people going above and beyond and reward that. Promotions come from operating at the level you want to be promoted to.
Some workplaces see it as a signal that they don't need a promotion because they can get the higher level work from you without the need to pay you more.
Know which one you're in before you decide how to approach it. If you've been there a while you should be able to figure out how things work. It's important to see how they actually work and not how you think they should work, otherwise you can end up doing a bunch of extra work for free.
The core of what the author is saying is true, I've experienced it myself (not a promotion, but a raise).
Taking on more than your responsibility is one way to do it, another (with some overlap) is to become indispensable.
In some cases, this means doing more work than your job entails, but not always. It can be something as simple as automating a task that someone else was doing by hand.
When you start stacking up little things that make you more valuable to the company, it's in its own best interest to find ways to keep you (via promotions, raises, benefits, etc).
There isn't a guarantee of anything here, but it definitely sets you up for success.
A thousand times more than sitting around whining that something isn't your job or that the company is being mean.
You should work harder and do things you aren’t paid for. In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs - everything from small lifestyle companies to BigTech and currently working as a staff consultant - it’s not to get a promotion at your current job, it’s to have a story to tell at your next job.
Speaking of BigTech specifically, the first company I worked for with a real promotion process that meant anything, the promo process is brutal and then you still get paid less than someone coming in at the same level.
The best bet is to get another job at another company at a higher level (or even at the same level that pays more).
I was reprimanded at three different software companies for doing exactly this, and not "staying in my lane" or "trying to do the senior person's job". So it only applies if you're already ahead of schedule on all your assigned work (difficult if they keep increasing your backlog), and the manager likes you but sees you as non-threatening, and people aren't territorial about RFCs.
Part of growing up is also knowing WHEN to do the extra, thinking about whether this will undermine people who dont like to be undermined, and then more fundamentally, what the hell am I doing in such a politically toxic place?
Its not just about going above and beyond. Its going above and beyond exactly where it will get you the best outcome and nowhere else.
The number of times I've been praised for going "above and beyond" has been absolutely dwarfed by "stay in your lane". Turns out, a lot of people don't appreciate you trying to prove you could do their job.
I mean is it not clear that companies are just an abstraction for a network of people, and you obviously must be be good with those people, ie seduce them into promoting you. And is it not clear that on the other side, you must keep your options open such that you find an alternative (job) if they are weird / toxic / dont like you / you dont like them?
It is a little bit like “it’s not what you know, is what you can prove”: I mean: “it’s not what you do, is what the boss of your boss sees”. And I emphasize “boss of your boss” because him is who you have to impress (or somebody 2 levels above, anyway).
Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
> Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
As you go up the levels that is exactly the job (for better or worse) so doing that is doing the work at the next level. You are organizational glue that connects people and ensures your team has proper visibility. If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
It does not have to be so, and in some companies is not so, notably the ones which thrive and meritocracy rules. Is a big fallacy to think all is politics, IMHO.
Between the most junior developer and the CTO, and all in between, is about taking good decisions, communicating clearly, and owning errors. If it is a healthy company with competent management, there is no need to make a powerpoint of every fart you shoot. Now the reality is, big companies are run typically by incompetent people with "cover your ass" mentality, with lots of internal and external corruption and nepotism. See Dilbert. It doesn't mean is the only model.
> If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
Big no. I totally knew and saw that, clear as day. But if when the position is open the nephew of the boss'es boss is looking for a job, you are just out of luck. Also if your boss is constantly talking bad of you anytime anyone internally asks for you.
My biggest issue with line level managers is that they don’t control budgets or have any real authority - raises, promotions, etc.
I love managing initiatives - just not people. But anytime I have been bought into a company where I was responsible for major company wide strategy, I made sure I reported directly to someone with authority - a director or a CTO. It was mostly small companies.
Even now where as a staff level employee where I do report to a line level manager (who is at the same salary band as I am) who I like and respect very much, I am making sure I have visibility and the ear of my skip manager and my CTO about things I care about - without stepping on my managers toes.
It uh.. was kind of weird that a junior dev wrote.. an.. rfc? I sense that this is a company that has somewhat adapted that concept for some kind of internal communication, or it's AI slop. All the jobs I'd ever had would probably call something like that a "design proposal" or similar.
Maybe this is a folksy anecdote about a junior developer working for John Email designing the protocol for trinary morse code over a token ring of twisted pair barbed wire. An RFC for that kind of project would be natural.
In the spirit of this, I propose we start calling things like flowcharts, SVG images of digraphs, UML diagrams etc "articles of war" just to spice things up.
Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money. At that point your only option is to move on, because if you stop performing at the "expected" level due to lack of reciprocation, suddenly you have "performance issues".
The second secret to getting promoted is working at a company that's growing.
If you're at a 50 employee company that grows to 250 employees there will be many empty team leader positions. And what you lack in hands-on management experience you make up for in knowledge of the business, its products/processes, and being a reliable known quantity. That extra responsibility will turn into more money fast.
On the other hand, if the company's headcount is largely stable and the employee turnover low? Well, there might not be an empty position until someone a level above you resigns, retires or gets fired. And when that happens - you're probably not the only ambitious person at your level. In this case, the payoff from extra effort is much less certain.
If you're at a larger company, then you'll probably have to line up another to get promoted. Having one foot out the door is often the ammo that managers need to get HR and leadership to approve a promotion.
Of course, we've been told to never accept a counter offer at your job.
You can find a bunch of articles by googling "never accept counter-offer" but they don't provide much in the way of hard data, it's mostly anecdotes.
Some articles say your relationship with your employer is like your relationship with your partner - any indication of looking elsewhere is disloyalty, and will inevitably lead to a break-up down the line if not now. Or it'll put you first in line for lay-offs. Other articles say your employer has a moral duty to pay a 'fair' amount, and if you can get 20% more elsewhere, that shows you should resent your current employer, and leave on principle. Or that threatening to quit and not following through makes you "the boy who cried wolf" and shows a lack of integrity. Or that the fact you were interviewing in the first place shows you weren't satisfied and fulfilled at your current job.
A lot of the articles are written by recruiters. They don't want people to take the counter-offer because it means they miss out on their 20% commission.
Personally I once accepted a counter-offer and it went just fine - in fact, the job offer would have needed an hour-long commute, whereas my job at the time had a 20 minute commute, so I got the extra money without the extra commute. It didn't limit my career or get me laid off or anything.
This was talked about in The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, iirc, but from the other side. It advises to not offer a raise to keep an employee planning to leave. This is because the implication is that you were underpaying them before or that you're willing to overpay them now for threatening to quit. This encourages employees to follow suit instead of working towards promo. So pay what you're willing to and don't play that kind of game.
The book/article goes in more depth. I thought it was still online for free but I can't seem to find it.
Sounds to me like it's the employer that should dislike counter-offers, not the employee. This advice is also made through an "employer is always right" lens. Is it really so bad to send a signal to an employee that they were underpaid?
To one employee? No. But other employees will probably find out. Now how will they try to get a raise? By working hard, or getting an offer letter and threatening to leave?
As an individual, if you fully intend to leave, and find your current employer trying to keep you that's a personal decision for sure. For me, I figure if I already put in all the effort to find a better job, I might as well take it. Maybe irrational, but at that point I've already weighed the decision on whether to go. My decisions to leave have usually not been purely about comp but other issues I have with the job.
One anecdata: The one time I accepted a counter-offer (but not for more money), I regretted it.
(I was at place that had an existential problem, and unhappily fighting it. Then, coincidentally, a different company, which had previously made me a tempting offer, checked back in. They made an offer to double my TC, which included a big title jump, to fit their pay grades. I wanted to be loyal to my team, so I went to the appropriate exec at my employer. I said I had an unsolicited offer that I had to decide on immediately, but I would stay if we could solve the problem. Was assured exec understood, and we could tackle the problem. I also asked for the company to do right by a couple other employees, while I had the exec's ear and the moment. Existential problem got worse, and couldn't be solved, for political reasons. Everyone was miserable, and I was out the boost to lifestyle and resume decorations.)
The more usual reasons I know not to mess with counter-offers are that: if the employer wasn't treating you fairly before, that's a problem; you might be flagged as disloyal; they might pay to keep you for temporary convenience, but get rid of you when more convenient for them.
In my experience, I've seen engineers try to take on more work to get promoted, but the key issue is that they were doing more work at their own level instead of focusing on work that would be their responsibility if they promoted. If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
> If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
This is one reason it's critically important for a company to have paths for ICs to take on larger responsibilities that aren't necessarily management responsibilities. Not everyone wants to be a manager, and not everyone is good at being a manager. Some people want to become increasingly senior engineers. (They'll still, ultimately, be responsible for things that involve other people, but that doesn't mean they want to be a people-manager.)
Great point. And I think this is why I love the framing in the OP.
“Do more” is a failure mode and path to burnout. “Do what I’m doing and you’re not doing” is a cue that an ambitious engineer can reflect on constantly.
That's also pointing to a big risk for certain jumps, as everything done in the list for, say, a cross team position means less work on your team. So a manager that isn't all that friendly can use an attempt at promotion as a great excuse for a PIP: I've seen that done around me at least a couple of times.
Yep, as a manager, I am explaining this conundrum often. You can be a rockstar SDE 2 or senior, but not be ready for a promotion because you aren’t leading enough.
If they do that, that's exactly why you don't want to promote them because it is clear they don't understand that doing x+5 work on your own is not as good as x*5 when you become multiplier by helping others.
Except the only way to do x*5 work is by your team hiring extra 5 people for you to manage... or, somewhat uniquely to our industry, through automating your own work.
Also, everyone else hears the same memes about "being a force multiplier" too. When everyone is trying to be a multiplier for the team by helping everyone else on it, the result isn't exponential productivity growth - it's drowning in exponential noise.
Like some other commenters correctly observed, the most significant factor is actually whether the company you're in is stable headcount-wise, or growing fast. In a stable company, promos are a contested resource, which makes the requirements arbitrary - you're graded on an ordinal scale, not a nominal one. In a fast-growing company, promos will happen to you, through no effort on your own - you can coast upwards on seniority alone.
In neither situation, consistently performing at the level above you is a differentiating factor.
Where's the guarantee for recognition of future growth....if they don't recognize past growth?
The biggest gripe I have about articles such as this is that it assumes a static perspective of "now, into the future" and it doesn't account for "all the time before now".
If I'm having a conversation akin to the one that opens the blog post, then presumably I've been at the company for a while. Conversations like that don't just happen between CTO and engineer unless there's some time vested in the company for both.
A CTO saying "take my job" as a non-sequitur is sus, IMHO. Now if it's said in the context of "here's a raise, and if you want another one....try to take my job", well now there's some decent context for the ask and a reason to believe that future growth will be compensated.
The best prediction of future performance is past behavior. That goes for mgmt as well as pee-on.
This, but it's not only about the additional work but often about additional responsibility.
Taking responsibility for decisions that actually fall within your manager's area of responsibility often puts them in a very comfortable position. At least if they trust you and don't question your loyalty, which is exactly what you also try to reassure them if you want a promotion.
However the net effect is that it's a reliable way to get stuck on that rung of the career ladder indefinitely.
Ideally this friction should be viewed as a normal part of career growth. You will have expanded your expertise and are now capable of harder problems and roles, with more compensation in return.
The typical moves are:
[1] Negotiate for more title, compensation at your current role (good outcome)
[2] Leave for a better role (a good outcome)
[3] Stay, no change, doing more work for the same money (not recommended)
Without a doubt there are toxic work environments and bosses that think the way you’ve stated.
That said my point of view as a manager was to try to hire people who could take my job someday. Those were the people that would make me look good by having a great team. I don’t need to steal their thunder because the higher you go in a healthy organization the more it’s about having people that can execute your strategy then about your individual contributions.
The best analogy for this I see is in the NFL when new, young head coaches seem to be afraid to hire experienced coordinators who have been fired as head coaches because they’re afraid of hiring their replacement if they fail. The thing is those ex head coaches were undoubtedly successful in their previous coordinator roles which is why they got a head coach gig to begin with and are likely the best option for making the new head coach successful.
Long story short it’s up to you to determine which type of leader you’re working for and and take ownership of moving on when in a toxic situation as opposed to a healthy one.
>>Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money.
Wait a minute. Why are you accepting more work, responsibility without increase in compensation? Promotion de facto means getting paid more.
Otherwise its just some one updating a row in the employee database with fancy text. How does it matter what designation you are called with?
I had a similar situation few years before COVID where a company offered a fancy designation albeit for 50% lesser the pay. All said and done, when I did all the calculations, even with me rapidly changing companies with newly acquired designation, and building from there. It would take more than a decade to merely arrive to the salary I was then. And that would still mean more than a decade of wasted raises, bonuses and RSU vesting at the then current job. By the time that fork got profitable, I'd be due for retirement.
While this is true... it's also letting yourself be massively taken advantage of, and underpaid.
Yes, the best way to get promoted is to do work above your level. The problem is, you're not getting paid what you deserve for that. If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.
Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the process.
Managers certainly want to take advantage of you by getting you to overperform without being overpaid. But employees should do everything they can not to fall for it. Which usually requires getting companies to compete over you.
As a boss-man myself, I’ve seen this “don’t let them take advantage of you” sentiment expressed in many discussions about comp and promotions, but I can’t really say I understand it. Am I just out of touch?
As I read it, the article is simply trying to help people understand what kind of work is valuable to a company and therefore what they should focus on to make themselves valuable. I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions! Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
(And this is all a bit separate, of course, than the debate about whether staying at a company or job hopping is better for career trajectory.)
> I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions!
This has not been my experience at all. I've had multiple positions where I took on multiple challenges and responsibilities outside my role, reshaped the team and took the lead on getting things shipped, made sure my manager was more successful, and spent a lot of energy making all this happens... for nothing.
> and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
Almost all of the people I've seen grow successfully never do any of this "take on extra responsibility" stuff. The vast majority were early hires that got along well with leadership in a fast growing company. Most of the promotions I've gotten felt almost arbitrary, and largely happened from being at the right place at the right time.
To be honest, I remain a hard worker who takes on extra responsibilities, simply because I enjoy it. I like solving problems and shipping things, it makes work fun. But I don't expect any recognition for it (even on annual reviews). The biggest reward for me is helping other people be successful and building cool things. Anyone working hard for a promotion or any recognition from the company is very likely wasting their time.
> that got along well with leadership in a fast growing company
I may be reading too much into your post but I'll say that this sentiment is a common pattern I see in many competent senior folks who think they deserve promotions into roles above senior. Getting along with leadership is a huge asset for for this type of leadership role. It means that you stay aligned and push in the same direction together.
If you're not going to get along well with your leadership you need to be much much better than everyone around you - which is a significantly higher bar to clear. And getting along well is a skill. It's usually not the skill people want to learn but it's hugely valuable to be able to be chummy with a difficult exec.
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best
You make a great point -- let me further explain so I'm not misunderstood.
If the person is putting in the same 40 hrs/wk (or whatever is standard) but just "doing their best", then there's no problem.
But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownership of new initiatives that is extra work. Usually something like 10-20 hours' worth per week. And so now people are working evenings and weekends to get that promotion, spending less time with their family. And a lot of them still don't get the promotion. For years, or even ever. This is all free labor for the company. They get away paying for a team of 4 instead of a team of 5.
That's what I'm pushing back on. In practice, it's rarely doing your existing work but better -- it's doing a bunch of extra work that takes more time. Because nobody ever says "hey show that you can take on these new responsibilities, and so do less of your original responsibilities".
Contrast this to actually being promoted, where some of your previous responsibilities are now actually delegated to others, because your job is now focused more on higher-level design and/or management.
I don't think that's how it works. Otherwise, a level 3 engineer would be working 40 hours a week but 4 engineer would be working 60 hours a week, which isn't the case.
These additional things a senior does that a junior doesn't aren't "write more code", they're "coordinate with people outside your team more", "be more self-directed", "be more reliable", etc. Things which don't take more time, but which juniors don't do.
> But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownership of new initiatives that is extra work.
Aside from AWS, who's famously bad at this, my experience is that this is usually because people want a faster career push.
Imagine Jim, 8 years into his career. Jim is pretty good and his work takes him 30-40 hours a week. If he worked another 5 years in the same role it'd probably drop to 20 and be chill.
Jim wants to get promoted. If he waited the 5 years he could do it working 40 hours a week. But he wants it now, and since he's not as good as he will be he needs to work 60. What does Jim do? He works the 60.
There's nothing wrong with this choice, I made it, I'm happy with my choice. I might make it again in the future, or not.
> There's nothing wrong with this choice [to work extra hours to get promoted].
But if there are limited slots for promotion, and that's generally always the case, the resulting competition among deserving engineers makes the extra hours more or less mandatory. Say that Amy is a better engineer than Jim and gets a third more done per hour. If Jim puts in 60 hours instead of the expected 40, then Amy isn't going to beat him for a slot unless she also starts working extra hours.
In the end, promotion becomes more about grinding than being effective. That's not great for company culture or retention of top talent.
That doesn't make the promotion more about grinding because the company doesn't care about how much work you get done in a set unit of time compared to other employees in the same set unit of time. The company cares about how much you get done, period.
If the only differentiating factor between Amy and Jim is quantity of work done (this is never the case in real life), most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.
In software development, sure (maybe). Most jobs aren't software development.
The vast majority of jobs your production slows as hours increase but there isn't a tipping point where you're less productive, even after accounting for errors or rework. There's a reason CPAs don't clock out at 37.5 hours during tax season, or warehouses or service desks or any number of things other than the specific thing most of us do often work more than 40 hours a week, especially when actively working to get a promotion.
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
Why don't you take a pay cut then? I mean, money is not everything, right? You can always pay your mortgage in integrity, work ethic or another buzzword.
Though last year I went to Hawaii and they refused my "great job, man" tokens, greedy assholes!
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech
The question is always how long you are "working" at the higher level.
I have worked at jobs where I was working 2 levels higher then I was for close to 3 years before my new manager came in and fixed that shit (got two promotions in 2 years).
As an individual contributor you are diluting your IC's value of the same people level if you are working at a higher level for free, the expectations is then that everyone else at your level does it and then it becomes the new normal, it's the "A rising tide lifts all boats" but in a negative connotation.
In my experience, the issue is that performing at the next level is not a guarantee for promotion. So when you do work at the next level, they can just say “it’s not sustained enough” or whatever reason and then you’re stuck — can’t really produce less so you end up looking for a way out because all that work was kind of for nothing.
I look for opportunities outside my job requirements to learn and grow but it gets really tiring and exhausting when you’re not rewarded for it. Basically there is a lot of upside for the employer but for the employee it’s a bit of a crapshoot
You are not out of touch. You may simply have spent time at great companies.
The OP’s advice is solid, but it assumes your manager will actively help promote you or work toward that outcome. In some companies, or with some managers, that support does not exist. There may be no incentive for them to do so. This does not necessarily come from ill intent, but rather from different organizational expectations.
Different companies can have vastly different work cultures, even if they're in the same location. So in a sense we're all a bit "out of touch" with each other.
Most days I go to work, I try my best, because if it turns out I don't get paid what I'm worth, I will F off somewhere else and take all this experience with me. And every time I've done that, I've had a significant pay rise.
The problem is that we're simultaneously talking about healthy and rotten companies. In a healthy company your manager tells you "if you want a promotion, this and this needs to happen" and then you get a promotion and a pay raise. Meanwhile in my company:
- I was given a project "please convince half of the company to drop everything and do work for our team"
- I told my manager "I don't know what you're expecting from me" and he said "I don't care"
- A coworker completed his project, but then was told that the promotion requirements changed
- A coworker was promoted, said that it was a big mistake because pay rose 10% but responsibilities 200%
The thing is, online discourse has little reason to discuss healthy companies. Sharing tips and tricks how to survive in a dysfunctional organization is much more interesting.
This makes sense and here is slightly different perspective to this.
The company I was at had this haloed culture of promotions and I saw people sat on a certain IC level for over 5 years chasing the carrot. Some of them were close to a decade at the same level.
Now, this company had several sub-orgs and it was possible to switch positions to a different team or an entirely different sub-org altogether. And guess what ? No up-leveling and no salary hikes because the overall company doesn't allow the sub-orgs to compete with each other.
Fair enough. Makes sense. If they allowed it, it would be chaotic.
But for some reason, their is a culture of making employees compete with each other ! To the point that the apparent lowest performer will be asked to leave the company ! (There are other ramifications to this "system" but this is not the discussion for those)
The lesson I learnt was to chose your battles wisely and be prepared for interviews every single day... because in a way it indeed felt like everyday I was interviewing/competing for the job I already had... why not dial it up to eleven ?
Once you feel prepared, then actually simply start interviewing. This year I am targetting at least six (once every two months) solid interviews. The more multi-stage-loops the better because that gives me the chance to politely drop out of the process at any stage. The more leetcode hards the better because leetcode hards are set in a specific way and the interviewer has to be super smart to follow up with something novel.
This way, I think (correct me if I am wrong) I am implicitly up-skilling and getting better at my job AND in a state of preparedness to walk away if I felt I needed to.
Managers be managing and all that $h1t... they have their jobs to do, I have my life to deal with as well. I will control what I can control.
Do the work one level up for a while and add it to your resume when searching for that higher level job at another company. Or maybe your current company will surprise you with a promotion in the meantime.
Or don't? Because the other company may hire you at the higher level anyways, that's the point. Because you're getting multiple companies to compete for the experience you already have. It's your task to demonstrate in interviews that you have the skills for that higher level. Which is a huge shortcut.
And "maybe your current company will surprise you" just sounds like being taken advantage of to me. Because the reality is they probably won't. Not at anywhere near the same speed, usually.
They want to see evidence you can do the job. Very often that's mainly tested in extensive interviews around your knowledge and skills. They don't have any kind of objective access to your current job anyways, and know very well that fancy-sounding achievements are often unreliable. Interviews give you the opportunity to demonstrate you have the skills without having to spend a year or two doing them in unpaid extra work.
When I say to not let yourself get taken advantage of by your employer, by working an extra 10-20 hrs/wk for free... you read that as "nickel-and-diming your employer"? And you think it's sad?
This is definitely something to be aware of - especially with larger companies that aren't growing fast and this culture begins to be baked in. You see so many colleagues going the extra mile past their role requirements to earn that rare promotion, essentially jockeying to be in the running. All hands are about 'calling out' great performers and thanking them. Thank them by paying them more please.
As soon as they get the promotion, the work piles on even more, and they won't be given the amount they would if they switched companies.
Good counterpoint. Throughout my rather long career I've known a few overachievers. The majority of them did not get promoted, and the ones who did get promoted were actually up-titled -- new title, miniscule pay rise.
Then there are those who do the bare minimum, have frequent unplanned absences and then have the gall to ask to be promoted to a senior level simply because they've been employed at a junior level for 2 years. (I heard this from a particularly gossipy manager. People usually never disclose these things.)
One thing is universally true. If you develop a reputation for being the person that regularly gets things done, somebody somewhere will notice. And that will improve your career prospects in the long run.
> If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.
This doesn't actually follow, for a variety of reasons, including that jobs have compensation ranges and in a lot of cases the bottom of one is pretty close to, or even below, the top of the previous one.
One of the big reasons that changing companies was good from a compensation perspective was 4 year initial offers. Upleveled job-switches do happen, but from what I've seen they don't usually happen much faster than internal promotions, and often they happen slower!
This post has some big gaps. Who is this for? When is it relevant?
The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.
Excerpting:
> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.
If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job
So the rules of promotions:
1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable
2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")
3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)
I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.
The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".
Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.
Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).
In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".
1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).
2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")
That’s addressed in the article by the person who identified a need and came up with both a proposal and estimate to address it.
Now if that person just implemented completely with no feedback that would be very dangerous as it might not work, take longer, or management didn’t actually care about it very much. Getting to the point of proposal + estimate then sign off is the sweet spot.
I would encourage everyone to identify when these rules don't apply!
However, I think these rules are generally safer than the claim that you should do something other than what you've said you would do (or, perhaps, other than what your manager has said you will do)
And if you are doing something much more important, there's a new rule which was probably worth emphasizing more: communicate aggressively. Over communicate. If you're doing A but your manager thinks you are doing B, communicate quickly and often about why you are doing A, what the impact is, and when you will get back to B (or whether B should be deprioritized)
On re reading both of our replies I don't think we disagree:
> First, _. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured
And you say:
> Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do
Yes, sure! But if it's not what's expected, then you probably have additional work that is called "communicating impact". And unfortunately, if you want to get promoted, you are going to have to spend some time communicating impact (unless the impact is self-evident, in which case you have already successfully communicated the impact)
1. Sharing ai generated content is fine if you tell everyone what it is (I recommend also sharing prompts).
2. Ymmv, but my manager would want to know "roughly how much work would this be?" I don't think it's worth it for you to spend very much time answering that question _unless you're actually going to do the work_. This means I'm saying 2 things: first: if it's free for you, you should convey how difficult your proposal is. Very rough buckets are ok if they're pretty close. Second: an easy way for it to be free for you is to prompt codex, and I expect you will do a better job prompting the answer than your manager will
Reading the original post, I also felt it was kind of missing exactly that: when this advice would not actually apply?
The linked article here aligns very well with some of my thoughts. Esp in the example described I would say that, if you find yourself filling too many or too big gaps, maybe think why these gaps exist there in the first place. You may just so happen to fill a void that nobody actually cares much about getting it filled (or is able to get it filled), even if it is work that needs to be done to get projects running, even if people recognize that, even if it actually brings results. Sometimes some may not really understand what brings the results, even if everybody likes results in the end.
Sure, at this point, substitute in whatever responsibilities are given to the role you're seeking:
> If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work
Fwiw, most tech companies do not consider eng management to be a promotion. The path to becoming a manager is thus "figure out that you want to be a manager, discuss how such a transition would look with your manager, etc"
That said, if you're not already earning the trust of your team (you do the things you say you'll do, etc) you will not have an opportunity to manage
Oh man, this is bad advice. So, maybe one manager said it... but having been a CTO/dev manager, I will say that having to deal with people trying to do a job that isn't their job is a royal pain in the ass. I have had to deal with this several times, both as someone on the sidelines and as the manager responsible.
When I was a CTO it ultimately required the talk: "It's MY job to manage dev resources and figure out what levers we push where with our limited money. When you try to do a different job then you got hired for, you screw that all up and set me and the company up for failure. If you don't want to do your job, you need to look for another one"
It definitely didn't make me want to promote those people.
A much better approach is to talk to your manager and skip manager about what great career development looks like to them. And if there is no path and that's what you're after, leave. (Lots of good jobs out there that just don't have this path for perfectly good business reasons, or the funnell is too full.)
Consider the possibility that their initiative was not the problem, the problem was that they were not aligned with you.
They were doing things you didn’t want, which made your job harder. But if they were doing things you did want, they would have made your life easier. Because then you would not have to do them.
Alignment with a superior is one part of every job, in fact the higher you go the more important it is. To be clear, alignment means they know what you want done without asking every time. It means they understand your mindset, strategy, and goals. I think it’s coachable to some degree, but some people just don’t seem to get it.
My advice is a little different. It’s make the life of your boss insanely easy. Similar in nature to post but slightly different optimization function. Don’t over communicate, communicate just the right amount. Anticipate questions. Don’t create any friction for them and be really helpful. Some of my people will anticipate things and be proactive. I love that and I constantly push to get them promoted.
Ive adopted this mindset recently and it really does work. That being said i feel it turns me into a bit of a “yes man”. I wish there was more room for more of my authentic personality
I am a longtime lurker. I signed up to say this: Never work extra without being paid extra. You can easily work your butt off and never get anything.
Sure, the boss and the company would like you to work extra, but when did the company ever pay you extra up front for work you—perhaps—would deliver at a later time?
You are a business. It’s not sound business to lower your own hourly rate.
Sure, if everything looks 100 percent aligned, buy the pretty girl a drink, but most of the time things are not aligned.
Don’t be the prostitute who expects to get paid later.
Also, if everyone followed this (OPs) advice that would be a problem. This is more suited to someone already being groomed or an employee who is being mismanaged. My employees do not have time to do unassigned work. If they find the time to present a project fully fleshed out the first thing i ask is where did you do this. At work? Problem, my KPIs are not accurate or youre a superstar who is going to walk unless i find room in the budget (unlikely) or start looking for your replacement because there wont be a reward for turning in unassigned work. Did you work on this at home? Problem as well, you are not paid to work at home. We do not want you to work outside of your hours of operation. Why did you do this?
The best promotion advice I have is to pick a great manager who is genuinely motivated to help you advance in your career. You won't get promoted easily by a manager who's checked out or likes counting beans.
Managers like that are few and far between. If you find one, make it clear to them you want to follow them because they'll get snatched from you in no time and be themselves promoted far far away.
How to find said manager? Ask around, do a little org chart recon in Outlook and do some networking. Where is the drama kept to a minimum in the org? What teams seem to be succeeding both internally and across to other teams. Are there teams where the techies are outspoken (positively) within the org and making a name for themselves in the org? Get to know the managers for those teams.
You may have heard people quit when their manager is a tyrant, this is very true! But there is a middling type of manager, not a horrible person, but also one that isn't helping you along either. Maybe plot and scheme on how to gracefully move to other teams you could better contribute to.
While this may work, it just seems like incredibly unhealthy advice to give or to take. People should be able to focus on their work without being expected to take up random side quests, and if there is a career path, make the requirements clear.
I agree. This outlook also implies a greater degree of meritocracy than usually exists in a competitive corporate environment. Doing a good job and taking initiative sometimes leads to promotions, but it sometimes just leads to more work. Meanwhile, many ladder climbers are busy optimizing for their own success, not the corp's.
Let's assume those requirements aren't made clear. People will still get promoted, based on side quests and initiative. And those people will have demonstrated a lot of important qualities that all the others (who were blocked on lack of requirements) never showed.
My personal experience with this from the manager's perspective: I aim to promote someone as soon as they are ready, but no sooner. If I promote someone who will not succeed against the expectations of the higher leveled title, I'm just setting them up to get fired or "managed out" when they were otherwise perfectly competent in the level they're at. That's ignoring the natural fuzziness and storytelling element of defining and measuring competence, of course, but that's the general idea of where I put the threshold.
"Readiness" means that I believe that after their promotion they will be able to execute at the higher level at least most of the time. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be already doing the higher leveled job, but in practice they do need to show that they can sustain some approximation of it.
Being promoted into obsolescence or into under performing is a death sentence. Some people are perfectly suited for their work and would find their bosses work to be numbing, too complex or too simple for them. Not getting a promotion is not a bad thing (do not mistake raises for a promotion). If the company cannot or will not allocate more to your position then that is a problem as a business, not something you can control. The best case scenario is to find another company who can pay your worth for the skill set presented.
I think the only possible flaw with this idea is you might not know.
I find that my organizational and leadership skills demonstrated in my role suffer when I am working on individual contributor work that requires deep focus and perhaps even isolation.
At the same time, I’ve handled other roles at other companies that required more leadership and team mentorship, where you’d look at my actions and feel more like I was management material. But in my current role with my current responsibilities it’s hard for myself let alone someone else to imagine that I would make an effective leader, since my job basically dictates that I don’t do that on a daily basis.
The day to day needs and responsibilities of the business often get in the way of the person actually demonstrating that they will excel when they do something else.
I don’t have any kind of direct solution for this specific dilemma. I think in my situation my manager should make more opportunities available but hasn’t been doing so due to the daily routine of putting out fires.
I’ve had great success “leading” in one business and difficulties in another. I learned what kind of orgs I can be effective at. They’re wildly different imo.
This advice only works at the team level. Beyond that, it’s borderline fantasy. At senior and leadership levels, promotions aren’t rewards for effort, they’re forward looking bets made by people above you, and those people have incentives, blind spots, and egos. Reporting to an insecure director or a clueless manager will quickly disabuse you of the “just do great work” myth.
Also, if the company isn’t growing, none of this matters. You can operate like a CTO all you want and all that happens is more work gets dumped on you for the same pay. Take on stretch work if you’re hungry for it and it’s explicitly acknowledged as next-level responsibility. Otherwise, you’re just volunteering to be exploited.
I think that works well for smaller orgs, but in larger organizations (especially where department headcount growth is not expected) it might be more complicated and more meta/political. I wish that were not the case, but in reality, trying to "do the job" of your manager can backfire.
My experience at several large companies I worked for, the promotion comes because the activities are already at the new, higher level. i.e., working at SVP/level 7 when officially at VP/level 6 for a period when the promotion is offered.
Good or bad, this is how the industry I work in promotes.
I think the best approach is to take on extra, above position responsibilities, accountabilities after discussion with superior, after agreeing in writing that this is part of a path to promotion.
I agree. I'd argue that if you can't start a conversation with your superior about future promotions and job goals, you're probably not gonna get that promotion anyway.
Your manager is gonna be the one asking their own manager to pay you more, and will be the one doing reviews.
Also: stepping on other people's toes can crush team morale, which can sure delay promotions. Saw it happening. Keeping the manager in the loop is a good way to avoid it.
Often you need not only to be at the higher level, but someone to call out that if they don't promote you you might leave. I've seen a lot cases (at many companies) where one person that everyone knows is good quitting for a promotion gets a dozen others promoted in the next few months. So if you realize you are not getting a promotion your leaving may be the trigger to get your coworkers promoted.
True, that can happen, but that feels toxic. A threat by the employee will always breed some negative feelings towards the employee, even if it is subconscious.
I am just writing about relatively sane, stable organization where the employer-employee relationship is stable and acceptable.
I think you (and the other) misunderstood. You are not threatening to leave here! Either you actually leave (their first notice is your two weeks), or someone else does and the company realizes if they don't promote good people fast those others will take the same hint and leave.
I agree that threatening to leave is a bad thing. Either get out or be content where you are: middle grounds do nobody any good.
Six months of unpaid stress for doing your managers job for a glimpse (not given!) promotion. You're a great manager, worked with a guy like you – never again.
If you read this and you're at the start of your journey, then heed my warning: nothing good comes out of this ever.
> Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap.
That's not what I learned from work. I saw people with skill way beyond their position hang around companies getting jack shit before they eventually got bored and left, and then other people getting thrust into seniority for arbitrary reasons:
> Oh, you got hired just three weeks ago? Well the rest of the team has just quit, so I guess you're in charge now.
> Corporate are trying to fix the gender imbalance in the c-suite, you're a woman, you want to be an executive?
Both of those people _were_ very good at what they did, but so were the other people who didn't get those arbitrary events.
I once was told "we cannot promote you because the work you've done checks the boxes for 2 rolls above you and does not check the boxes for your next roll"
IME, taking on extra responsibility doesn't get you promoted. However, you can take it on and then find a new job with a better salary where the responsibility you added is part of the expectation.
The blog is not terrible advice, but "getting promoted" just seems like a waste of time and effort nowadays. To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.
To get hired away from Google to an L6-equivalent role at Meta (or whereever) you need to get halfway through one L6 project and do a few hours of interviewing. There's no comparison in the level of effort. (And I'm not picking on Google here. I think it's the same or worse nearly everywhere.)
It's a real problem. I saw people boomerang back to Google after 18 months at one or even two levels higher, much faster than they could have been promoted internally.
The 85%ile of L used to be above that of the lowest 15%ile of L+1 so in the year that you demonstrate L+1 you'll get compensated as L+1.
Now, the 85%ile of L is less than that of the lowest 15%ile of L+1 so until you actually get promoted there's no real compensation difference. Which makes leaving for L+1 so much more attractive (and also going above-and-beyond less attractive).
> To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.
100% agreed. Just as importantly, you also need to be aware of what type of an environment you are in and plan accordingly.
Sometimes, you are just in an environment where it is somewhere between extremely improbable and nearly impossible to get promoted. At that point, you would be better served to put more effort into changing that environment, instead of chasing the grind. I learned that one the hard way a few years ago, at, ironically, Google.
I was on track to a promo, got a documented track record, got the backing of multiple managers + my team lead, etc. But guess what? Another reorg happened shortly before the cutoff for the review cycle, i got a new manager who literally just met me for the first time, and my chances tanked to essentially zero (which is understandable, because I don’t see how a manager who just discovered my existence a week prior would be able to effectively back my promo package). Since then, I had an average of 3-5 major reorgs and 1-2 manager changes per year. As I came to eventually realize, this type of a dysfunctional environment wasn’t conductive to a good career velocity.
Needless to say, my decision to just put my head in the sand and grind harder to compensate for this kind of organizational instability was stupid. It would’ve definitely been a better bet (in terms of time/effort, career trajectory, and compensation) to put even just a portion of that effort into changing my environment, as opposed to trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction with raw work effort.
TLDR: if you care about having a good promotion velocity, focus on the biggest blocker in your specific situation. Whether it is the lack of track record demonstrating sustained effort at the L+1 level, or your environment being dysfunctional in ways that make promotions improbable, etc. Just gotta keep the eyes on the prize, and pick the solutions that are the most appropriate for your individual situation (instead of blindly just doing "XYZ because I read that it was a great career advice" in a single-minded manner).
I'm not sure if I'm off base here, but at this point google is a 20yo company with a massive existing revenue, I don't think the company is growing itself as much as it is maintaining its revenue and moat, in a similar fashion, you will be a promotion not for doing stuff, but just by dedicating years of your life in exchange for stability.
With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.
I don't agree with this advice at all. Do the work you're paid to do - no more, and no less. In my experience, working extra doesn't actually get you more respect from an employer. Often times, it's the opposite.
Back when I was working as salaried employee, I never asked for a promotion or a raise. Not once. But I got them! Meanwhile, I watched coworkers spend years fighting for promotions, taking on so much more work than I would ever agree to, and were repeatedly denied. Eventually, they would give up and get a job elsewhere. Some did manage to get promoted, but it was grueling.
These coworkers weren't less skilled than I was. I would say many of them were actually more capable, despite my position being ranked higher.
A lot of comments here are talking about "healthy" work cultures and whatnot. I worked for medium-sized tech companies that you've heard of with great engineering cultures and a healthy approach to work-life balance. I don't believe that "healthy" results in getting recognized for going above and beyond.
Others are mentioning office politics. I did not befriend coworkers, did not make enemies, etc. I simply did my work.
I'm sure many of you have had the experience that if you make a mistake—not necessarily at work, but just in general—and then apologize profusely, you will be treated worse than if you were more casual or didn't even apologize at all. I find that making yourself "smaller" will often result in people taking advantage of you. Similarly, it seems to me that working super hard will simply raise people's baseline expectations of you, and they will exploit that. This isn't necessarily a conscious thing on behalf of your boss(es), but it's absolutely something that happens.
Given all of that, my advice is to simply do your job. Over time, you will gain more experience, and that experience will potentially turn into promotions naturally. If not, then get a new job. Note however, that I'm not a proponent of frequent job hopping (I never spent less than three years at a company).
If you're not self-employed, then your work is making someone else rich. No need to make them even richer if you're not getting compensated for it.
For me the "responsibility first" part is the most important. I care more that you are willing to take responsibility at a higher level than your absolute performance at what you do. Because if you take responsibility you might make mistakes but you will fix them. But if you make mistakes and don't fix them, then giving you more autonomy is a liability. Fixing mistakes often involves demonstrating many aspects of operating at a higher level as well - you take the lead on communicating with other teams about the mistake, addressing the impact, apologising for any harm caused.
For me, taking responsibility is one of those necessary (but not sufficient) things I have to see before I will consider a promotion (at least, a genuine one where someone actually operates at a higher level with more autonomy).
There are a lot of factors that go into achieving success in the workplace. There are usually competing ideas of what success is to you, versus what it is to the one rating you or paying you. You have to, at some level, appear to be good at something they think is good to have around. Sometimes that aligns with what you think is good, sometimes it doesn’t.
Of course the advice in OP is going to be relative, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to have a good sense of what your immediate does, how they think, what metrics they value, etc. If not for your own advancement- keeping immediate leadership off tilt can greatly increase QOL, or vice-versa. I personally would love to have leadership above me that I think "damn, I'd like to be a little more like that guy" but in almost 20 years of being in the workforce, including military and the likes, that kind of leadership has been hard to come by.
This is just recycled advice that's been given for 30+ years. "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" etc. The thing is this only really "works" in healthy or semi-healthy environments. You could just as easily have an infantile, poorly qualified, easily threatened middle manager above you that will perceive this kind of behavior as an attack and take the legs out from under you in ways that you have very little control over (has happened to me)
In many cases, yes, sometimes it involves a parallel move to a different part of the company, or the manager moving on - problem is when you're in that situation it may not be obvious for literally years until it becomes very obvious in an instant, and by that point, your options may be more limited.
This sounds like surface level wisdom if you are in your earlier career. I see several problems with this advice, but here is the most obvious one: this only works if you want to become a manager.
It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.
Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).
this is recommending an employee work outside their scope in the hopes of getting promoted. it really depends on the company culture and if internal promotions are common otherwise it's just you doing your manager's work, and i don't see why anyone should be taking on more responsbilities without getting paid for it.
In some cases, yeah, but in others it just sounds like a company with a lot of regulatory constraints and a strong "need to know" culture. Internal moat building often reflects in their business model as well. Not that I'd like to work in that environment, but I've seen it work and work well.
This is one of the best pieces of career advice one can give, and I’ve had my fair share of experience that this works very well.
Most people wait to be promoted to the title/designation to do the work of that role. However, if you want to avoid friction when asked, “Why should I promote you to this role?”, you should already be doing the job and proving you can do it.
I once saw a QA tester tinkering with the front-end code, fixing the bugs himself, then went to the engineer and pointed out where to fix. When asked if he wanted to become a front-end engineer, I realized he was waiting for an opportunity to be promoted. So, I repeated my usual advice: if you want to be promoted, be already doing that role. He started learning, and work on front-end work besides his QA work. When he asked to be promoted, it was just a title change and a pay raise. He went on to lead the Product Design Team at a major oil company (at a branch in Bangalore, India). A Good photographer, and always has an eye for design.
Similar story of an engineer waiting to be promoted to a Lead Architect. Advised him to start doing it way before talking about his promotion. I don't remember his promotion in the team I was working but heard back that he was easily gotten to that position and a big salary jump at a new company (a new city). I once saw him working in the plane we were flying together, while I was sleeping. I think he deployed when we landed.
In touch with both, and lot others. None that I had advised on doing the role above them have regretted.
Good advice, in general. But there is a risk here, which is that you're encouraging people to do something which isn't their job.
Are you sure you don't want this person working on the things they are supposed to be working on?
Further, even if it all goes well, you're encouraging someone to do a more stressful job and not (yet) compensating them. Given the fact that you can't practically promote everyone you want, this risks your senior-with-junior-title feeling taken advantage of and prone to look for their title elsewhere.
My early boss had a different approach. If you want a promotion, you need to have people in place who can do your job. That was touchy. If I had people capable of doing my job, what would happen when we do layoffs (which happened regularly)? But it was also through a period of strong growth, so the boss needed proven people in place to take on new opportunities.
Working for a firm during its strong growth phase is very different from trying to climb a 10,000-deep corporate ladder.
I saw such a team of 3 people, who earns $500,000 in month.
Advice: solve business bottlenecks.
Their approach:
- research the biggest problem in a
company with as less communication as possible
- prepare a full, easy plan well designed. They used slides and a designer.
- split the plan on parts and first part is already with a nice designed demo. Make sure a founder/boss’s work is only pay and say yes. Zero headache.
- make a meeting and pitch it, so a founder/boss can’t say no
I don't want to take my boss's place, though. I don't want to manage people, I want to address problems on a broader scope than I'm currently in a position to do.
> "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
When I was a junior, mid, and starting senior level developer, I was so focused on getting ahead, and I would’ve listened intently to this.
The reality is though that most managers and principal or higher devs are great with you taking on responsibility if you’re ready for it, and making mistakes and learning is often fine, but when you stop respecting those with more experience and start working around them, they’re not going to be happy.
My advice: take on responsibilities and do the work, but always respect others. You will never regret giving someone enough respect. If you have a heart or a brain, you will almost certainly regret not treating someone with respect; it will haunt you, even if you one day apologize to them.
This is only good advice if your company has high profit margins or funding and an expectation of growth, or your manager is extremely kind and trusting, or there are signs your manager is about to be fired/reorged and consultants or higher ups are asking if you want to replace them. More established industries or stagnating companies with low profit margin and no VC backing do not have a lot of room at the top, there are "negative selection" processes for management, and trying to do your boss's job is likely to be seen as insubordination. In those organizations the managers keep their job not by excelling at it (typically they would have leveled out due to the Peter principle) but by actively culling threats, and have all kinds of dirty tricks they can use to get rid of you if you show too much initiative.
I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.
This is nonsense to get you to work more for the same pay.
Its good to do this to get an idea of what it means to work on a higher level but it WILL NOT get you promoted.
Promotion is about leverage. What can you supply that no one else can and thats crucial for your bosses-boss's success?
Stop thinking execution - its exactly the opposite of that.
Can you recruit people from other organizations, can you create a new product, work with every part fo the comapny, evangelize the company externally, attract capital ...
Make clear what your goals are to your manager, brainstorm with your manager what kind of specific work would lead them to recommend you for promotion. Then propose that specific work, get them to agree, deliver the work, and hold them to their agreement. Ideally talk to other stakeholders/skip-levels since promotions are usually by committee and you want as many allies as you can in the room.
You also want to figure out if it even makes sense to go for a promotion, if the organization isn't growing - it's going to be a lot harder/impossible to make it.
It also may not be financially worth it if you care about work-life-balance. It might be worth it to get paid 50-70% as much but not have to spend your day in back to back meetings. It may even pencil the same if you consider hourly rates and taxes.
If you want to get promoted, you need a succession plan. You need to train up the person who will be the new you. If you're important enough to be promoted, you're too important to replace, so you'll be stuck where you are until you have a successor in place. By doing this you automatically demonstrate leadership.
It's like this: if you want to become a certain kind of person, start now. If you want to be a writer, start writing now. This doesn't just apply to career advancement; it almost applies to everything.
On a tangential note, I have a concern with all such advices from a technology standpoint. These are all ways to understand the rules and constraints for upward mobility and make them work for you. More and more people are bubbling up in technology roles and roles impacting the long term outcome for technology by using the ~smart/outcome driven/cheat sheet. Building thoughtful systems require long term vision and commitments, not sure if any of this fits in that picture though. Lately everything is just A MVP.
What horrible advice. Stop telling people to work harder without compensation. This isn't simply a matter of choice, it hurts the collective workforce. This isn't a charity, this is our livelihoods!
This was always my secret to getting a job I’m not qualified for on paper.
At one point early in my career the old engineer left. I quickly stepped in “just until they hired somebody qualified”. Back then, a 4 year CS degree was required to get the job.
For reasons I can’t recall, we couldn’t hire someone for 6 months. My boss and I had a meeting with HR where he pleaded my case to get me hired. The HR director was actually yelling that I wasn’t qualified.
My boss calmly replied “He’s been doing it for the past 6 months. He’s actually been making improvements. Remember that process of yours that suddenly got a lot better? He did that.” I ended up getting hired right there. There was further drama about me being at my pay scale without a degree but my boss shielded me from much of it.
For that 6 months and for another 12 months after, I probably spent 18 hours a day working or learning to get up to speed. I was single and motivated so it worked out. Loved that boss.
That was many decades ago so I keep an eye out for that spark among my colleagues. I occasionally see it but for the most part, they are much more ambitious than I was and that warms my heart. (Two of them started companies you’ve heard of and cashed out)
This matches my experience. I’ve hired more than 30 people, and only a handful really stayed and made an impact. The difference was never title or position, it was who actually took responsibility when things were unclear or hard. Roles can be assigned, but ownership can’t.
Why do you work you’re not paid to do? The exact job of a manager is to handle the staff development. If you’re not doing that then what are you getting paid for?
Absolutely, but also you need to make sure you take on the strategical work of your manager and not the typical day 2 day stuff at operational/expected level, you need to do stuff above your waist line.
I liked the article and it’s right, but at the end of the day you also need to make sure your manager puts you up for promotion and that he is allowed by their management as well.
This stuff is so difficult because it's all situational. In my first job I got hired into a small team, within a year or so my boss quit. I essentially stepped into that job. But in order to be the manager of that team you needed ot be a certain level of seniority, so I was doing the job, but I couldn't have the title or the money. I talked to my manager and made clear that I wanted the job and asked how I get there. The answer was that I needed to be a grade 7 and I was only a (new) grade 5, and since there are only a handful of promotions they can give each year, all things being equal I would get promoted to the seniority level needed to be doing that job in about 6-10 years.
I was essentially doing what this article was advising, but because of the corporate structure I was in, I was just volunteering to be taken advantage of. The correct strategy actually was just to leave. I wasn't going to be successful in that structure, it wasn't a meritocracy and the business results over time went how you would expect. In the end I leverage a job offer to put myself on track to get into that role within 2 years, but in reality that was 2 years wasted, I should've left immediately.
> What he meant was simpler and more powerful: start doing the job before you have the title. Take on more responsibility before you're officially given it.
protip: this won't get you promoted, won't get you any accolades within the company, and will more like get you on a Performance Improvement Plan
if you want to get promoted, get a offer at another company and take that offer
if you want a fat bonus, if your company has a formal bonus structure, do other's people's work for them while potentially neglecting your own
If a person is profitable to have around, than the conversation is simple:
1. Company has money people may want
2. People have unique skills a company needs to profit
3. Everything else is 100% unrelated BS
On average, every software developer brings in >$1.3m USD/year in additional revenue. If you are being exploited, than just find a better gig someplace better... as it is usually easier than advancing out of a critical role.
Salaries with legal encumbrances are usually just a terrible deal in the long-term. =3
Really good advice, and honestly wish I had known this at the start of my career. It makes a lot of sense, exactly because proactiveness is the secret sauce to a lot of successes in life.
If your boss tells you explicitly that this is ok, then go ahead. And also if they don't tell you this, it might be ok too. But there's scenarios were you are being paid to do a very specific job, and trying to get promoted is a form of escapism for many and it can be an organizational problem.
In argentina we have a saying "Too much chief for too few indians"(as in indigenous people), everyone wants to be the boss, no one wants to do the dishes.
I've been a victim of this, and it especially was a problem when my actual role responsibilities suffered, but even if I managed to fulfill my responsibilities perfectly, it caused friction and a command chain confusion. (especially when other people tried to compete for a promotion as well)
It's hard for me to take advice like this seriously when, in my experience, things like budget and manager's social influence is more deciding in whether you get promoted or not than whatever work you did.
But but but, in some scenarios it has been at the expense of my well being. It’s not good to take on more work and not let go of some of the things you’re currently doing. Moreover, finding “permission” from your boss to let those things go can be challenging.
I’ve found this works best when you and your boss agree on the problem you’re stepping into (not necessarily your solution). It may be that you need to stick your neck out and suffer for awhile for them to see your perspective.
When you’re on the same page about what you’re solving, a good manager will clear room for you.
Standard promo advice tbh. Do the job and then ask for it. Except there's a brief moment when you are adding value not in proportion to your compensation which will be infuriating. Sometimes its also possible you end up stagnant where you keep performing at a higher level and never get the job. My advice is to always check your market value by talking to recruiters and/or HMs outside of your company. That way once you have the relevant bullets on your resume, either you get the promotion or you just leave. Hedge your bets.
So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advice. But still this article presumes a lot.
In my experience, managers will naturally partition their reports into three buckets: their stars, their problems and their worker bees. The worker bees tend to be ignored. They're doing fine. They're getting on with whatever they've been told to do or possibly what they've found to do. They're not going to create any problems. The problems are the underperformers. These are people who create problems and/or are at risk of getting a subpar performance rating.
Now there are lots of reasons that someone can be a problem. I tend to believe that any problem just hasn't found the right fit yet and, until proven otherwise, problems are a failure in management. That tends to be a minority view in practice. It's more common to simply throw people in the deep end and sink or swim because that takes much less overhead. You will see this as teams who have a lot of churn but only in part of the team. In particularly toxic environments, savvy managers will game the system by having a sacrificial anode position. They hire someone to take the bad rating they have to give to protect the rest of the team.
And then there are the stars. These are the people you expect to grow and be promoted. More often than not however they are chosen rather than demonstrating their potential. I've seen someone shine when their director is actively trying to sabotage them but that's rare.
Your stars will get the better projects. Your problems will get the worse ones. If a given project is a success or not will largely come down to perception not reality.
The point I'm getting to is that despite all the process put around this at large companies like performance ratings, feedback, calibration, promo committees, etc the majority of all this is vibes based.
So back to the "take my job" advice. If someone is viewed as a star, that's great advice. For anyone else, you might get negative feedback about not doing your actual job, not being a team player and so on. I've seen it happen a million times.
And here's the dirty little secret of it all: this is where the racism, sexism and ableism sneaks in. It's usually not that direct but Stanford grads (as just one example) will tend to vibe with other Stanford grads. They have common experience, probably common professors and so on. Same for MIT. Or CMU. Or UW. Or Waterloo. And so on.
So all of the biases that go into the selection process for those institutions will bleed into the tech space.
And this kind of environment is much worse for anyone on the spectrum because allistic people will be inclined to dislike from the start for no reason and that's going to hurt how they're viewed (ie as a star, a worker bee or a problem) and their performance ratings.
Because all of this is ultimately just a popularity contest with very few exceptions. I've seen multiple people finagle their way to Senior STaff SWE on just vibes.
And all of this gets worse since the tech sector has joined Corporate America in being in permanet layoff mode. The Welchian "up or out" philosophy has taken hold in Big Tech where there are quotas of 5-10% of the workforce have to get subpar ratings every year and that tends to kill their careers at that company. This turns the entire workplace even more into an exercise in social engineering.
Yeah the only solution to avoid this is to find a company where building and selling a product actually matters. In large companies it’s too easy to fudge the connection between individual contributions and financial impact.
If you’re not looking to become a founder, companies right around 100 employees is the sweet spot in my (very limited) experience.
Smells like LLM written. Maybe useful advice though. Who actually writes the hyphen in compound modifiers (or even knows what that is)? E.g. "team-level" instead of "team level".
Definitely, although maybe it's ok here. I'm not sure. The opening paragraph doesn't feel like it. The rest could be condensed to 1 or 2 paragraphs and it would better communicate the idea.
It's not too bad because it's not too long, but I think it's worse than if the human had just written a second part to the post about the length of the first part.
Notice there's all these needless sections that have the LLM-form.
> What "Taking the Position" Actually Looks Like
> Why Sustained Performance Is What Counts
> The Responsibility-First Mindset
And each has this opening paragraph setup then a one sentence paragraph contradicting or reinforcing it, which is simultaneously punchy and pure fluff.
> I couldn't have been happier.
> And I mean sustained.
> But that's backward.
I can't really tell how much the author cares about any given bit of text beyond the starting paragraph because it's all expressed with too many words that don't say anything, but just evoke the marketing/linkedin-speak, giving everything too much weight.
To refer to something as "team-level" seems so absurdly unspectacular, relative to the other kinds of signals that exist for sussing out AI writing, that I'm surprised it was worthy of mentioning at all.
"Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap. You've got to show that you're capable of handling the responsibility for a sustained period of time."
Some classic management gaslighting. You have to work for a few years at the level of the higher position to get it. I will trust your work at this level, profit off of it, hold you responsible for it but not pay you appropriately for it. It's always the compensation piece that takes time.
Not really related to what I said but I'll bite. Let me try phrasing it in a different way, if someone asked you to, in addition to doing your own job, do someone elses, but instead of paying you for that additional work said you'd get great "exposure" and a future reward, would you jump at that chance?
I know many people that have because they care, they are hungry, they want to advance, they can do higher level things and want to prove themselves, etc. and the vast majority of them have gotten nothing for their trouble but extra work. We live in a world where working hard is always encouraged and its virtues extolled but rarely rewarded.
I’ve participated and appealed to promotions committees at a few big tech companies and the principle for achieving the promotion is sustained performance for a half or 2 at the next level, judged by a number of dimensions. A couple drivers are revenue impact, business direction, or how well you are enabling others to succeed.
If the staff is large enough, calibrations are done to find template team members at the higher level, to make it very clear that the candidates performance is meeting that higher bar.
I think most ICs think “I’ve been working hard, I deserve a promotion”. A better barometer is whether your peers assume you are already at that higher level without knowing your rank.
The problem is when you reach SR the next step is often so far removed that you can't have that impact without not doing your real job. A jr to mid-level engineer: just be better at what you do. However Sr to the next level is a whole different way of working and you can't do those things and also write the code that a sr is expected to write.
This is peak office cuckoldry. Please mr sir, may I have more work and responsibility for the same pay! Please sir, I am hungry for more work and stress!
This site is so detached from reality sometimes its hard to even say anything.
some personal advice i recently learned is to show youre boss's boss if you really want to be promoted
ive been "trying to take my boss's position" for a few years and he really appreciates it. but during my last review my boss's boss pointed said he wasnt aware of any of this. i was leaving him off all my cc lists because i figured he didnt want the cluttered inbos. he said the opposite, he thought i wasnt following up and doing my job
all my effort was actually having a negative effect in the perspective of the decision maker. hopefully i knock his socks off this year since apparently the bars been lowered to the floor
These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.
Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?
TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:
- I've been a developer in XX language for NN years. How do I get my next job when the company is now hiring YY developers instead?
- There are lots of Level II jobs for YY, but I'm at level IV. Will eligibility rules even allow this transition?
- There are some Level V positions for YY, but my level IV in XX doesn't really qualify me in a way that would pass a tech screen.
The concerns in these types of posts are just so... different.
If the CTO is setting their position as the goal, we're talking about the managerial ladder.
ICs and specialists (I see product managers and directors as specialists as well) should have other options, but if all you're managing is people, getting more people under you is usually the only path forward.
In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).
With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:
1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).
3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.
4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.
5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.
Smaller details for your bigger picture:
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
It's both.
You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.
The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.
> demonstrating performance at your boss's level
To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.
It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)
It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.
These are great clarifications.
And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.
I've seen a couple of patterns:
1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.
2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.
Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.
I really don't get this
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted
If you're an engineering IC, and your boss is a manager with 4 other ICs, your boss's goals are twofold: get at least 5 ICs worth of results from the team, and managing people.
So to do what you and TFA suggest literally you can either:
- Do 5 ICs worth of work
- Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
I've seen coworkers try to manage their peers, aiming for a promotion. To say the least it harms team unity.
I only managed to do the 2nd once when I was thrown into a project with an absentee manager and doubly-booked half-committed members who were actually happy for someone to organize the work. Those sorts of situations are rare. Or maybe that's the unstated qualification.
And: Do 5x the amount of work, well...
Maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough here, but I need some examples of how this is generally achievable. Maybe this was specifically _not_ about the IC-manager divide, and more like managers and manager-managers?
What I'd more generally expect is for a manager to explicitly put you in charge of a small, short term project with one or two other people and see how it goes: can everyone contribute, did you achieve results, were you transparent, how did you interact with the other members, etc.
This is a good question. I compressed too much: instead of "performance at your boss's level" I really meant, "helping to achieve your boss's goals".
If you're an engineering IC in a team of 5, what are your boss's goals? It's usually things like: hit your deadlines, avoid production bug catastrophes, and maybe add features that make the sales people happy.
How can your boss achieve those goals? I have a few ideas:
a) Processes: Introduce or refine processes for the team to ensure high-quality code or to gain efficiencies.
b) Mentoring: Help members of the team to function at their highest level.
c) Clearing Obstacles: Coordinate with other teams so they don't slow you down. E.g., make sure teams you depend on are on schedule, and if not, adapt and adjust.
But this is just an example. I think the easiest thing to do is ask your boss what their goals are. What does success look like to them? Once you know that, you might be able to come up with ways of helping that they might not have thought of.
This sounds like advice for how to be promoted to a specific level -- the first point where awareness of things beyond yourself is required (somewhere around the Senior or Staff level for ICs, depending on your company).
Generally everyone in a team should be working towards some shared goal, there's no level at which you can be a chaos agent and not serve some higher purpose. The difference at this level transition is that you realise that for yourself -- someone doesn't need to remind you of the goal and nudge you back on course. That same realisation is not going to cut it at higher levels.
For me the general version of this advice is not something you can just tell the person who's being promoted, it's collective advice, for them, their manager, their tech lead: everyone needs to agree that this person needs to be given more rope, they need to do something useful with that (i.e. not hang themselves with it), the people around them need to watch out for when they start tying a noose and help them untie it (already regretting this analogy), and that's how you get promoted.
The rope takes different forms for different levels. I'll use the level scale I'm familiar with, starting with a newly graduated engineer at L3:
- L3 -> L4. You help decide how to build the feature.
- L4 -> L5. You help decide what features are worth building, and are trusted to maintain them.
- L5 -> L6. You help shape the work and ongoing maintenance of ~10 people's work (what products are worth building and how), over a time horizon of 6 months to a year.
- L6 -> L7. ~50 people's work, 1-2 years.
- L7 -> L8. ~200 people's work, 2-5 years.
- L8 -> L9. Things start to get fuzzy. The pattern suggests that you have a hand in ~1000 people's work, which is possible to do in the moment, but rare. There's two ways I can think of: you're either a world expert in your field, or you have set the technical strategy well for your organisation as it grew to this size.
This is just based on my experience, working largely on infrastructure teams both in big tech and in start ups as both an IC and a manager (currently an IC).
Yes--excellent points.
I think at the higher levels (L8+) the job switches to creating a culture that can accomplish goals.
I think those are good examples. I think part of the confusion is that most of those are typical responsibilities of e.g. senior level IC work, so "performance at your boss's level" looks more or less the same as "performance at your current IC level".
Which is good advice! Do your job well!
I'd say it's about doing things at the next level to show you're ready for that level. So for moving from a Sr to a Staff position might involve doing more mentoring of the team, showing that you are using your knowledge to improve the efficiency of both your team and other teams, etc.
> Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
Anecdotically, a coworken in my group started, on his own initiative, to “play manager” in out team, because he wanted to “help us all”. Of course he just wanted to ascend the ladder. That backfired instantly and spectacularly. I would never act with any authority if it was not very clearly delegated by my team, or my superior; and even then I would walk like in thin ice for the first 6 months
Agreed--that's a recipe for failure.
If you can't gain/keep the respect of your peers, you will not get promoted either (at least not at any company I would work for).
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
So technically, it is using your past experience to prove that you are operating at the next level
> Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
How ridiculous the opposite sounds: You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level. You'd get laughed out of the room. But the company has this exact deal in reverse.
> > Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
My current company used to work this way, but they moved to a "needs-based" promo process. You can be promoted to L5 if your manager can justify the need for an L5.
Which ends up making promotions significantly harder to come by. It's near impossible to justify the need for an L5 role when you already have L4s doing the work. No matter how far outside their level competencies a person works, that work becomes L4 work... because an L4 is successfully performing it.
It's a deeply silly and frustrating system.
I'm in this exact situation described in the two comments above. I explained to my manager that the project I have been working on has developed a lot since the last two years and if he would hire a replacement he would be looking at a senior person, not a junior. He agrees but he gets rejected when he made the case to his boss. My performance reviews have been above expectations. His boss claimed that it would not be fair to other people that stayed in the position for a similar amount of time before getting a promotion, essentially ignoring my exceptional performance.
Do you guys have any advice for this situation?
This depends a bit on your company’s structure.
My company, for e.g. is fairly flat, and my boss is more or less aware of everyone’s contributions in my team, he often works with them directly.
I also work with my report’s reports directly and am fairly aware of their work.
Despite this, some engineers, to my surprise, act as we have a strict hierarchy and try to reach to me through their managers.
From the sounds of your description, there are a few possibilities:
1. Your boss’s boss is aware of your work. She is also aware of others’ and she does not think that yours particularly stand out and she is willing to risk your departure. In this case, you would need to really look at this objectively. Are you really exceptional? Why does not she think so if that’s the case? Is there someone else who are also great (or giving that impression) that you are not aware?
2. She does not know you very well. If so, why is this the case? Does she not know anyone, or are you keeping your work to yourself? I’ve definitely been in this situation, despite architecting our whole core systems, years later I found nobody other than my fellow engineers knew. Was a hard-earned lesson for me, you need to start speaking about your work outside of your 1-1s, but not in a promotional way. By frequently offering your hard-earned wisdom where it is helpful.
3. She is not interested in knowing anyone. She will manage her team at a high level and she either won’t promote anyone until she is forced to (e.g. you are leaving otherwise), or when she is given a budget and asked for it, which she will then ask for recommendations, your chances than unlikely to be proportional to your work but be circumstantial. If this is the case, you should start interviewing.
Interview for another job.
Changing jobs every 2 years is the best way to increase your career long earnings.
People who do not move, signal that their market value is lower than the current compensation.
For extra money move right after a pay rise (so that you can negotiate higher salary)
This sounds like a recipe for the very best leaving. Do you see that pattern?
Its almost as if the definitions and expectations around titles are arbitrary and a song and dance around the value you bring/the current market rates
One thing that I've seen implemented to prevent that is to have the pay bands for level N and N+1 overlap. So in the time that you're doing "next level" work, you're expecting to be at the top of your current pay band, and then the promotion doesn't automatically give you a big pay raise, but it unlocks a pay band that you can go up in.
This works if performing at the top of your current level equates to performing at the bottom of the next level. That said, there's a problem where sometimes a "promotion" is really a new role, meaning to perform at the next level, you have to kind of not perform well at the current level.
It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job: 1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help) 2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates) 3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)
It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation.
It's a good deal if you deserve the promo. Giving someone the opportunity to take on projects at the next level and having them not deliver can be enormously expensive. The higher the level, the more expensive it is.
Possibly. It's the only way it actually works though, because of the Peter Priciple.
Imagine the other way - you have peopel dong a role, and the people who do the best job at that role get promoted to the next one. Some of them will be good and the new role, some of them won't. The ones who are good will carry on getting promoted. The ones who aren't will get stuck in that role. The problem is that everyone rises to a point at which they can't do the job, and every role is filled by someone who has been promoted one step too far.
In a healthy structure, it should be a halfway house - you shouldn't have to be doing the whole job that you're trying to get promoted to, you should be doing enough bits and pieces of it that you demonstrate that you CAN do it. That way the company has information that they're not promoting you to a position of incompetence.
> You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level.
Did you just describe an academic scholarship?
How exactly do you suggest it should work, then? A timer starts and when it runs out you get promoted and everyone just hopes you didn't just get moved up above your level of competence?
I suppose it balances in the end, though. If you could make more money elsewhere you'd go elsewhere, so the whole reason you are willing to accept being underpaid through the transitionary phase is because you realize that you will be overpaid afterwards.
That's true. I am out of the promotion game grind now. Personally, I have reached my ceiling and the time is better spent else where.
1 is correct. You can't expect the person to get better when promoted, rather you move them to the job they are already (almost) doing
Ideally with increased autonomy and decision-making ability that makes them more effective.
This is premised on promotions and other work rewards having any kind of rational basis or connection to the work.
It could simply be that spending time with your boss makes them know and like you more, and people tend to reward people they know and like, making up some post hoc rationalization about performance or whatever to justify it.
No one wants to think of themselves like this, though, so they would never admit, even to themselves, that this is what's going on, but I suspect for most people it's the actual reality.
You have some mistakes stories to avoid ?
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
It can not be farther from the truth.
The best way to stay in the bottom is to work hard, to focus on work so that others have time to focus on advertising themselves, take credit of your good work and backstab you for everything else, befriend and lick the shoes strategically -even develop bed skills, for some- while you isolate yourself by sweating and believing everyone will understand or care about how you optimized that for loop.
Cynicism is a seductive drug. It makes you feel good because you don't have to do anything--the game is rigged, so why bother trying? But like all drugs it is ultimately self-sabotaging.
Careers are like love: you have to risk heartbreak or you'll never experience joy.
The keyword in what they wrote is "demonstrating". You do still need to advertise what you've done.
So basically you need to do a lot of bla bla bla bla ?>
I don't think there's a one size fits all here. If you don't go out of your comfort zone and "do more" you may never get a promotion because you're seen as average. But it's also true that if you work hard and constantly deliver you may still never get the promotion because you're seen as critical where you are.
You might be disappointed either way. Like any recipe, there are many ingredients needed to pull it off. Delivering results, solving your boss' or boss' boss problems, doing it visibly, having support from above, doing it at the right time, etc. all contribute.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
> 2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
That's not evidence for 1. At least you haven't explained a reason why it would be.
> if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it
lol
Ah, the classic "work even harder and do things you're not paid for with zero guarantee that someone will appreciate what you're doing while the company reaps the benefits". What a novel thought, I am so glad I clicked the article, especially since the author isn't even speaking from experience so he has nothing to back up his blogpost with.
Listen, you don't have to do this and are free to disagree.
However, this method has worked and will continue to work. Lots of people are fine just doing their shift and leaving, that's ok. Some people are not satisfied with that and want more, and there are strategies to do more work and get paid to do so.
Both of these comments have a kernel of truth.
Yes, you must do more than average to get promoted.
But also yes, if you do more and more and don't get the rewards you want, don't just continue. Either scale back again, or modify your strategy, or apply this strategy elsewhere.
I'm seeing widely opposing takes here; my experience is that the advice is correct depending on where you are. I've worked in places where someone who works 130% is seen as company's profit. But I'm currently at a place where making an extra effort is definitely rewarded with promotions.
I've literally never gotten a promotion without taking on the additional responsibilities first. I wouldn't expect a promotion for just doing time at a company like a prison sentence. If they didn't promote me then I would have immediately moved on.
And the advice is not (necessarily) "work extra, unpaid hours".
Exactly, working harder doesn’t mean putting in extra hours. It means taking on projects with larger scope, impact and ambiguity during your normal working hours
There's a matrix, with each cell being weighted differently.
Do free work. Do good work. Be liked by your superiors.
And sadly "good work" is weighted the lowest. And if you are liked enough by your superiors, that's often enough.
And you are actively disliked by your superiors, it does not matter how much work you do or how good it is. You will plateau.
It's almost as if it depends on the context and there isn't a simplistic bumper sticker approach.
Not to diminish your skepticism, but your reply comes off jaded in a way that might be hurting you. The author's suggestion for employees seeking promotion is to operate on a higher level than they're asked to and keep operating in that fashion for a sustained window of time. Show growth, in other words.
This reads to me like you translated GP’s cynical post into something more palatable to the politically-minded. You’ve said the same thing.
They're both correct, in different contexts.
Some workplaces see people going above and beyond and reward that. Promotions come from operating at the level you want to be promoted to.
Some workplaces see it as a signal that they don't need a promotion because they can get the higher level work from you without the need to pay you more.
Know which one you're in before you decide how to approach it. If you've been there a while you should be able to figure out how things work. It's important to see how they actually work and not how you think they should work, otherwise you can end up doing a bunch of extra work for free.
It’s a lot easier just to do enough to talk the talk and get another job…
This just comes across as extraordinarily whiny.
The core of what the author is saying is true, I've experienced it myself (not a promotion, but a raise).
Taking on more than your responsibility is one way to do it, another (with some overlap) is to become indispensable.
In some cases, this means doing more work than your job entails, but not always. It can be something as simple as automating a task that someone else was doing by hand.
When you start stacking up little things that make you more valuable to the company, it's in its own best interest to find ways to keep you (via promotions, raises, benefits, etc).
There isn't a guarantee of anything here, but it definitely sets you up for success.
A thousand times more than sitting around whining that something isn't your job or that the company is being mean.
You should work harder and do things you aren’t paid for. In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs - everything from small lifestyle companies to BigTech and currently working as a staff consultant - it’s not to get a promotion at your current job, it’s to have a story to tell at your next job.
Speaking of BigTech specifically, the first company I worked for with a real promotion process that meant anything, the promo process is brutal and then you still get paid less than someone coming in at the same level.
The best bet is to get another job at another company at a higher level (or even at the same level that pays more).
Felt like AI slop. I used to do what it recommends, and it got me nowhere other than more stress and higher expectations from senior management.
I was reprimanded at three different software companies for doing exactly this, and not "staying in my lane" or "trying to do the senior person's job". So it only applies if you're already ahead of schedule on all your assigned work (difficult if they keep increasing your backlog), and the manager likes you but sees you as non-threatening, and people aren't territorial about RFCs.
Part of growing up is also knowing WHEN to do the extra, thinking about whether this will undermine people who dont like to be undermined, and then more fundamentally, what the hell am I doing in such a politically toxic place?
Its not just about going above and beyond. Its going above and beyond exactly where it will get you the best outcome and nowhere else.
The number of times I've been praised for going "above and beyond" has been absolutely dwarfed by "stay in your lane". Turns out, a lot of people don't appreciate you trying to prove you could do their job.
I mean is it not clear that companies are just an abstraction for a network of people, and you obviously must be be good with those people, ie seduce them into promoting you. And is it not clear that on the other side, you must keep your options open such that you find an alternative (job) if they are weird / toxic / dont like you / you dont like them?
Reads like of those things people post on LinkedIn.
Same. If anything it only welded me in my position, because I was just very valuable doing what I was doing. Absolutely crap advice, IMHO.
Were you simply doing more of the same or were you actually doing the job of the level above you? Those are not the same.
I tested both. None worked.
It is a little bit like “it’s not what you know, is what you can prove”: I mean: “it’s not what you do, is what the boss of your boss sees”. And I emphasize “boss of your boss” because him is who you have to impress (or somebody 2 levels above, anyway).
Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
> Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
As you go up the levels that is exactly the job (for better or worse) so doing that is doing the work at the next level. You are organizational glue that connects people and ensures your team has proper visibility. If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
It does not have to be so, and in some companies is not so, notably the ones which thrive and meritocracy rules. Is a big fallacy to think all is politics, IMHO.
Between the most junior developer and the CTO, and all in between, is about taking good decisions, communicating clearly, and owning errors. If it is a healthy company with competent management, there is no need to make a powerpoint of every fart you shoot. Now the reality is, big companies are run typically by incompetent people with "cover your ass" mentality, with lots of internal and external corruption and nepotism. See Dilbert. It doesn't mean is the only model.
> If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
Big no. I totally knew and saw that, clear as day. But if when the position is open the nephew of the boss'es boss is looking for a job, you are just out of luck. Also if your boss is constantly talking bad of you anytime anyone internally asks for you.
It actually worked for me, got my last promotion that way (IC -> EM)
I don’t consider a line level manager a promotion. I consider that the fifth level of hell.
The pay bump was nice, but I totally get where you're coming from. I'm actually thinking about moving back to IC
My biggest issue with line level managers is that they don’t control budgets or have any real authority - raises, promotions, etc.
I love managing initiatives - just not people. But anytime I have been bought into a company where I was responsible for major company wide strategy, I made sure I reported directly to someone with authority - a director or a CTO. It was mostly small companies.
Even now where as a staff level employee where I do report to a line level manager (who is at the same salary band as I am) who I like and respect very much, I am making sure I have visibility and the ear of my skip manager and my CTO about things I care about - without stepping on my managers toes.
It uh.. was kind of weird that a junior dev wrote.. an.. rfc? I sense that this is a company that has somewhat adapted that concept for some kind of internal communication, or it's AI slop. All the jobs I'd ever had would probably call something like that a "design proposal" or similar.
Maybe this is a folksy anecdote about a junior developer working for John Email designing the protocol for trinary morse code over a token ring of twisted pair barbed wire. An RFC for that kind of project would be natural.
In the spirit of this, I propose we start calling things like flowcharts, SVG images of digraphs, UML diagrams etc "articles of war" just to spice things up.
It says "more junior engineer on the team" which could mean senior vs stuff, or regular vs senior. At least that's how I understood it.
after uBlocking the feed on LinkedIn the Kool Aid slop is now here as well ...
I've almost always been promoted by doing this. If not, I'm able to use the paid training to get another higher paying job at a different company.
Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money. At that point your only option is to move on, because if you stop performing at the "expected" level due to lack of reciprocation, suddenly you have "performance issues".
The second secret to getting promoted is working at a company that's growing.
If you're at a 50 employee company that grows to 250 employees there will be many empty team leader positions. And what you lack in hands-on management experience you make up for in knowledge of the business, its products/processes, and being a reliable known quantity. That extra responsibility will turn into more money fast.
On the other hand, if the company's headcount is largely stable and the employee turnover low? Well, there might not be an empty position until someone a level above you resigns, retires or gets fired. And when that happens - you're probably not the only ambitious person at your level. In this case, the payoff from extra effort is much less certain.
If you're at a larger company, then you'll probably have to line up another to get promoted. Having one foot out the door is often the ammo that managers need to get HR and leadership to approve a promotion.
Of course, we've been told to never accept a counter offer at your job.
> Of course, we've been told to never accept a counter offer at your job.
Do you have a example article? I haven't encountered the advice, but I'm curious if the reasoning matches my guess.
You can find a bunch of articles by googling "never accept counter-offer" but they don't provide much in the way of hard data, it's mostly anecdotes.
Some articles say your relationship with your employer is like your relationship with your partner - any indication of looking elsewhere is disloyalty, and will inevitably lead to a break-up down the line if not now. Or it'll put you first in line for lay-offs. Other articles say your employer has a moral duty to pay a 'fair' amount, and if you can get 20% more elsewhere, that shows you should resent your current employer, and leave on principle. Or that threatening to quit and not following through makes you "the boy who cried wolf" and shows a lack of integrity. Or that the fact you were interviewing in the first place shows you weren't satisfied and fulfilled at your current job.
A lot of the articles are written by recruiters. They don't want people to take the counter-offer because it means they miss out on their 20% commission.
Personally I once accepted a counter-offer and it went just fine - in fact, the job offer would have needed an hour-long commute, whereas my job at the time had a 20 minute commute, so I got the extra money without the extra commute. It didn't limit my career or get me laid off or anything.
This was talked about in The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, iirc, but from the other side. It advises to not offer a raise to keep an employee planning to leave. This is because the implication is that you were underpaying them before or that you're willing to overpay them now for threatening to quit. This encourages employees to follow suit instead of working towards promo. So pay what you're willing to and don't play that kind of game.
The book/article goes in more depth. I thought it was still online for free but I can't seem to find it.
Sounds to me like it's the employer that should dislike counter-offers, not the employee. This advice is also made through an "employer is always right" lens. Is it really so bad to send a signal to an employee that they were underpaid?
To one employee? No. But other employees will probably find out. Now how will they try to get a raise? By working hard, or getting an offer letter and threatening to leave?
As an individual, if you fully intend to leave, and find your current employer trying to keep you that's a personal decision for sure. For me, I figure if I already put in all the effort to find a better job, I might as well take it. Maybe irrational, but at that point I've already weighed the decision on whether to go. My decisions to leave have usually not been purely about comp but other issues I have with the job.
One anecdata: The one time I accepted a counter-offer (but not for more money), I regretted it.
(I was at place that had an existential problem, and unhappily fighting it. Then, coincidentally, a different company, which had previously made me a tempting offer, checked back in. They made an offer to double my TC, which included a big title jump, to fit their pay grades. I wanted to be loyal to my team, so I went to the appropriate exec at my employer. I said I had an unsolicited offer that I had to decide on immediately, but I would stay if we could solve the problem. Was assured exec understood, and we could tackle the problem. I also asked for the company to do right by a couple other employees, while I had the exec's ear and the moment. Existential problem got worse, and couldn't be solved, for political reasons. Everyone was miserable, and I was out the boost to lifestyle and resume decorations.)
The more usual reasons I know not to mess with counter-offers are that: if the employer wasn't treating you fairly before, that's a problem; you might be flagged as disloyal; they might pay to keep you for temporary convenience, but get rid of you when more convenient for them.
> The second secret to getting promoted is working at a company that's growing
I would say this is the #1 most important factor.
If a company isn’t growing, you’re relying on attrition to move up.
90% of the people I know who moved up to senior positions rapidly all worked at fast growing companies.
In my experience, I've seen engineers try to take on more work to get promoted, but the key issue is that they were doing more work at their own level instead of focusing on work that would be their responsibility if they promoted. If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
> If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
This is one reason it's critically important for a company to have paths for ICs to take on larger responsibilities that aren't necessarily management responsibilities. Not everyone wants to be a manager, and not everyone is good at being a manager. Some people want to become increasingly senior engineers. (They'll still, ultimately, be responsible for things that involve other people, but that doesn't mean they want to be a people-manager.)
"No bastard ever got promoted by doing a lot of work for the company. He got promoted by getting someone else to do a lot of work for the company."
- General George S. Patton, probably
Great point. And I think this is why I love the framing in the OP.
“Do more” is a failure mode and path to burnout. “Do what I’m doing and you’re not doing” is a cue that an ambitious engineer can reflect on constantly.
That's also pointing to a big risk for certain jumps, as everything done in the list for, say, a cross team position means less work on your team. So a manager that isn't all that friendly can use an attempt at promotion as a great excuse for a PIP: I've seen that done around me at least a couple of times.
Yep, as a manager, I am explaining this conundrum often. You can be a rockstar SDE 2 or senior, but not be ready for a promotion because you aren’t leading enough.
If they do that, that's exactly why you don't want to promote them because it is clear they don't understand that doing x+5 work on your own is not as good as x*5 when you become multiplier by helping others.
x+5 is greater than x*5, if x=1. But great thinking, just make sure you're transparent with your team members so you neither get x+5, nor x*5.
Except the only way to do x*5 work is by your team hiring extra 5 people for you to manage... or, somewhat uniquely to our industry, through automating your own work.
Also, everyone else hears the same memes about "being a force multiplier" too. When everyone is trying to be a multiplier for the team by helping everyone else on it, the result isn't exponential productivity growth - it's drowning in exponential noise.
Like some other commenters correctly observed, the most significant factor is actually whether the company you're in is stable headcount-wise, or growing fast. In a stable company, promos are a contested resource, which makes the requirements arbitrary - you're graded on an ordinal scale, not a nominal one. In a fast-growing company, promos will happen to you, through no effort on your own - you can coast upwards on seniority alone.
In neither situation, consistently performing at the level above you is a differentiating factor.
"promotion" is just a word. Either management can pay for performance, or employ can perform for pay, and cut back on work hours.
Exactly.
Where's the guarantee for recognition of future growth....if they don't recognize past growth?
The biggest gripe I have about articles such as this is that it assumes a static perspective of "now, into the future" and it doesn't account for "all the time before now".
If I'm having a conversation akin to the one that opens the blog post, then presumably I've been at the company for a while. Conversations like that don't just happen between CTO and engineer unless there's some time vested in the company for both.
A CTO saying "take my job" as a non-sequitur is sus, IMHO. Now if it's said in the context of "here's a raise, and if you want another one....try to take my job", well now there's some decent context for the ask and a reason to believe that future growth will be compensated.
The best prediction of future performance is past behavior. That goes for mgmt as well as pee-on.
This, but it's not only about the additional work but often about additional responsibility.
Taking responsibility for decisions that actually fall within your manager's area of responsibility often puts them in a very comfortable position. At least if they trust you and don't question your loyalty, which is exactly what you also try to reassure them if you want a promotion.
However the net effect is that it's a reliable way to get stuck on that rung of the career ladder indefinitely.
Really strange. I don't see the extra responsibility by those high up in the chain. I just don't see those guys being held accountable.
Instead, I see a lot of talk down to the bottom of the chain about "Taking ownership".
Ideally this friction should be viewed as a normal part of career growth. You will have expanded your expertise and are now capable of harder problems and roles, with more compensation in return.
The typical moves are: [1] Negotiate for more title, compensation at your current role (good outcome) [2] Leave for a better role (a good outcome) [3] Stay, no change, doing more work for the same money (not recommended)
Without a doubt there are toxic work environments and bosses that think the way you’ve stated.
That said my point of view as a manager was to try to hire people who could take my job someday. Those were the people that would make me look good by having a great team. I don’t need to steal their thunder because the higher you go in a healthy organization the more it’s about having people that can execute your strategy then about your individual contributions.
The best analogy for this I see is in the NFL when new, young head coaches seem to be afraid to hire experienced coordinators who have been fired as head coaches because they’re afraid of hiring their replacement if they fail. The thing is those ex head coaches were undoubtedly successful in their previous coordinator roles which is why they got a head coach gig to begin with and are likely the best option for making the new head coach successful.
Long story short it’s up to you to determine which type of leader you’re working for and and take ownership of moving on when in a toxic situation as opposed to a healthy one.
It’s absolutely true that you need to be willing to move on if your current employer doesn’t reward you for what you do.
That doesn’t negate the value of working above your title. Even if you need to leave, doing better work makes your resume and interviews stronger.
>>Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money.
Wait a minute. Why are you accepting more work, responsibility without increase in compensation? Promotion de facto means getting paid more.
Otherwise its just some one updating a row in the employee database with fancy text. How does it matter what designation you are called with?
I had a similar situation few years before COVID where a company offered a fancy designation albeit for 50% lesser the pay. All said and done, when I did all the calculations, even with me rapidly changing companies with newly acquired designation, and building from there. It would take more than a decade to merely arrive to the salary I was then. And that would still mean more than a decade of wasted raises, bonuses and RSU vesting at the then current job. By the time that fork got profitable, I'd be due for retirement.
Promotion == Pay/Compensation Raise.
While this is true... it's also letting yourself be massively taken advantage of, and underpaid.
Yes, the best way to get promoted is to do work above your level. The problem is, you're not getting paid what you deserve for that. If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.
Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the process.
Managers certainly want to take advantage of you by getting you to overperform without being overpaid. But employees should do everything they can not to fall for it. Which usually requires getting companies to compete over you.
As a boss-man myself, I’ve seen this “don’t let them take advantage of you” sentiment expressed in many discussions about comp and promotions, but I can’t really say I understand it. Am I just out of touch?
As I read it, the article is simply trying to help people understand what kind of work is valuable to a company and therefore what they should focus on to make themselves valuable. I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions! Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
(And this is all a bit separate, of course, than the debate about whether staying at a company or job hopping is better for career trajectory.)
> I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions!
This has not been my experience at all. I've had multiple positions where I took on multiple challenges and responsibilities outside my role, reshaped the team and took the lead on getting things shipped, made sure my manager was more successful, and spent a lot of energy making all this happens... for nothing.
> and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
Almost all of the people I've seen grow successfully never do any of this "take on extra responsibility" stuff. The vast majority were early hires that got along well with leadership in a fast growing company. Most of the promotions I've gotten felt almost arbitrary, and largely happened from being at the right place at the right time.
To be honest, I remain a hard worker who takes on extra responsibilities, simply because I enjoy it. I like solving problems and shipping things, it makes work fun. But I don't expect any recognition for it (even on annual reviews). The biggest reward for me is helping other people be successful and building cool things. Anyone working hard for a promotion or any recognition from the company is very likely wasting their time.
> that got along well with leadership in a fast growing company
I may be reading too much into your post but I'll say that this sentiment is a common pattern I see in many competent senior folks who think they deserve promotions into roles above senior. Getting along with leadership is a huge asset for for this type of leadership role. It means that you stay aligned and push in the same direction together.
If you're not going to get along well with your leadership you need to be much much better than everyone around you - which is a significantly higher bar to clear. And getting along well is a skill. It's usually not the skill people want to learn but it's hugely valuable to be able to be chummy with a difficult exec.
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best
You make a great point -- let me further explain so I'm not misunderstood.
If the person is putting in the same 40 hrs/wk (or whatever is standard) but just "doing their best", then there's no problem.
But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownership of new initiatives that is extra work. Usually something like 10-20 hours' worth per week. And so now people are working evenings and weekends to get that promotion, spending less time with their family. And a lot of them still don't get the promotion. For years, or even ever. This is all free labor for the company. They get away paying for a team of 4 instead of a team of 5.
That's what I'm pushing back on. In practice, it's rarely doing your existing work but better -- it's doing a bunch of extra work that takes more time. Because nobody ever says "hey show that you can take on these new responsibilities, and so do less of your original responsibilities".
Contrast this to actually being promoted, where some of your previous responsibilities are now actually delegated to others, because your job is now focused more on higher-level design and/or management.
I don't think that's how it works. Otherwise, a level 3 engineer would be working 40 hours a week but 4 engineer would be working 60 hours a week, which isn't the case.
These additional things a senior does that a junior doesn't aren't "write more code", they're "coordinate with people outside your team more", "be more self-directed", "be more reliable", etc. Things which don't take more time, but which juniors don't do.
> But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownership of new initiatives that is extra work.
Aside from AWS, who's famously bad at this, my experience is that this is usually because people want a faster career push.
Imagine Jim, 8 years into his career. Jim is pretty good and his work takes him 30-40 hours a week. If he worked another 5 years in the same role it'd probably drop to 20 and be chill.
Jim wants to get promoted. If he waited the 5 years he could do it working 40 hours a week. But he wants it now, and since he's not as good as he will be he needs to work 60. What does Jim do? He works the 60.
There's nothing wrong with this choice, I made it, I'm happy with my choice. I might make it again in the future, or not.
> There's nothing wrong with this choice [to work extra hours to get promoted].
But if there are limited slots for promotion, and that's generally always the case, the resulting competition among deserving engineers makes the extra hours more or less mandatory. Say that Amy is a better engineer than Jim and gets a third more done per hour. If Jim puts in 60 hours instead of the expected 40, then Amy isn't going to beat him for a slot unless she also starts working extra hours.
In the end, promotion becomes more about grinding than being effective. That's not great for company culture or retention of top talent.
That doesn't make the promotion more about grinding because the company doesn't care about how much work you get done in a set unit of time compared to other employees in the same set unit of time. The company cares about how much you get done, period.
If the only differentiating factor between Amy and Jim is quantity of work done (this is never the case in real life), most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.
> most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.
What happens in reality is that Amy produces 10% more in 40 hours than Jim in 60 hours, but she's not a team player because she leaves at 5.
In software development, sure (maybe). Most jobs aren't software development.
The vast majority of jobs your production slows as hours increase but there isn't a tipping point where you're less productive, even after accounting for errors or rework. There's a reason CPAs don't clock out at 37.5 hours during tax season, or warehouses or service desks or any number of things other than the specific thing most of us do often work more than 40 hours a week, especially when actively working to get a promotion.
> Am I just out of touch?
You are.
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
Why don't you take a pay cut then? I mean, money is not everything, right? You can always pay your mortgage in integrity, work ethic or another buzzword.
Though last year I went to Hawaii and they refused my "great job, man" tokens, greedy assholes!
> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech
The question is always how long you are "working" at the higher level.
I have worked at jobs where I was working 2 levels higher then I was for close to 3 years before my new manager came in and fixed that shit (got two promotions in 2 years).
As an individual contributor you are diluting your IC's value of the same people level if you are working at a higher level for free, the expectations is then that everyone else at your level does it and then it becomes the new normal, it's the "A rising tide lifts all boats" but in a negative connotation.
In my experience, the issue is that performing at the next level is not a guarantee for promotion. So when you do work at the next level, they can just say “it’s not sustained enough” or whatever reason and then you’re stuck — can’t really produce less so you end up looking for a way out because all that work was kind of for nothing.
I look for opportunities outside my job requirements to learn and grow but it gets really tiring and exhausting when you’re not rewarded for it. Basically there is a lot of upside for the employer but for the employee it’s a bit of a crapshoot
You are not out of touch. You may simply have spent time at great companies.
The OP’s advice is solid, but it assumes your manager will actively help promote you or work toward that outcome. In some companies, or with some managers, that support does not exist. There may be no incentive for them to do so. This does not necessarily come from ill intent, but rather from different organizational expectations.
Different companies can have vastly different work cultures, even if they're in the same location. So in a sense we're all a bit "out of touch" with each other.
Most days I go to work, I try my best, because if it turns out I don't get paid what I'm worth, I will F off somewhere else and take all this experience with me. And every time I've done that, I've had a significant pay rise.
The problem is that we're simultaneously talking about healthy and rotten companies. In a healthy company your manager tells you "if you want a promotion, this and this needs to happen" and then you get a promotion and a pay raise. Meanwhile in my company:
- I was given a project "please convince half of the company to drop everything and do work for our team"
- I told my manager "I don't know what you're expecting from me" and he said "I don't care"
- A coworker completed his project, but then was told that the promotion requirements changed
- A coworker was promoted, said that it was a big mistake because pay rose 10% but responsibilities 200%
The thing is, online discourse has little reason to discuss healthy companies. Sharing tips and tricks how to survive in a dysfunctional organization is much more interesting.
> please convince half of the company to drop everything and do work for our team
And don't forget to do that on IC level, without official shot caller title.
Bro I was trying to get promoted to senior software developer.
Hope you're in a better company now. Best of luck.
Yes
This makes sense and here is slightly different perspective to this.
The company I was at had this haloed culture of promotions and I saw people sat on a certain IC level for over 5 years chasing the carrot. Some of them were close to a decade at the same level.
Now, this company had several sub-orgs and it was possible to switch positions to a different team or an entirely different sub-org altogether. And guess what ? No up-leveling and no salary hikes because the overall company doesn't allow the sub-orgs to compete with each other.
Fair enough. Makes sense. If they allowed it, it would be chaotic.
But for some reason, their is a culture of making employees compete with each other ! To the point that the apparent lowest performer will be asked to leave the company ! (There are other ramifications to this "system" but this is not the discussion for those)
The lesson I learnt was to chose your battles wisely and be prepared for interviews every single day... because in a way it indeed felt like everyday I was interviewing/competing for the job I already had... why not dial it up to eleven ?
Once you feel prepared, then actually simply start interviewing. This year I am targetting at least six (once every two months) solid interviews. The more multi-stage-loops the better because that gives me the chance to politely drop out of the process at any stage. The more leetcode hards the better because leetcode hards are set in a specific way and the interviewer has to be super smart to follow up with something novel.
This way, I think (correct me if I am wrong) I am implicitly up-skilling and getting better at my job AND in a state of preparedness to walk away if I felt I needed to.
Managers be managing and all that $h1t... they have their jobs to do, I have my life to deal with as well. I will control what I can control.
Do the work one level up for a while and add it to your resume when searching for that higher level job at another company. Or maybe your current company will surprise you with a promotion in the meantime.
Or don't? Because the other company may hire you at the higher level anyways, that's the point. Because you're getting multiple companies to compete for the experience you already have. It's your task to demonstrate in interviews that you have the skills for that higher level. Which is a huge shortcut.
And "maybe your current company will surprise you" just sounds like being taken advantage of to me. Because the reality is they probably won't. Not at anywhere near the same speed, usually.
Companies usually want to see evidence you’ve done the kind of work required in the job you’re applying for.
They want to see evidence you can do the job. Very often that's mainly tested in extensive interviews around your knowledge and skills. They don't have any kind of objective access to your current job anyways, and know very well that fancy-sounding achievements are often unreliable. Interviews give you the opportunity to demonstrate you have the skills without having to spend a year or two doing them in unpaid extra work.
You seem way too concerned with "nickle-and-diming" your employer. Which is just as sad as an employer who nickle-and-dimes their employees.
When I say to not let yourself get taken advantage of by your employer, by working an extra 10-20 hrs/wk for free... you read that as "nickel-and-diming your employer"? And you think it's sad?
Found the manager.
How is it sad? CEO of your run of the mill bigtech swims in money like Scrooge McDuck and you simp for them?
This is definitely something to be aware of - especially with larger companies that aren't growing fast and this culture begins to be baked in. You see so many colleagues going the extra mile past their role requirements to earn that rare promotion, essentially jockeying to be in the running. All hands are about 'calling out' great performers and thanking them. Thank them by paying them more please.
As soon as they get the promotion, the work piles on even more, and they won't be given the amount they would if they switched companies.
Good counterpoint. Throughout my rather long career I've known a few overachievers. The majority of them did not get promoted, and the ones who did get promoted were actually up-titled -- new title, miniscule pay rise.
Then there are those who do the bare minimum, have frequent unplanned absences and then have the gall to ask to be promoted to a senior level simply because they've been employed at a junior level for 2 years. (I heard this from a particularly gossipy manager. People usually never disclose these things.)
One thing is universally true. If you develop a reputation for being the person that regularly gets things done, somebody somewhere will notice. And that will improve your career prospects in the long run.
>>Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the process.
This is why most companies don't offer a promotion as a part of hiring process, and are mostly hiring at currently levels, but at a pay raise.
In some cases where a promotion is available, they often pay below your current compensation, which defeats the whole point of the process.
> If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.
This doesn't actually follow, for a variety of reasons, including that jobs have compensation ranges and in a lot of cases the bottom of one is pretty close to, or even below, the top of the previous one.
One of the big reasons that changing companies was good from a compensation perspective was 4 year initial offers. Upleveled job-switches do happen, but from what I've seen they don't usually happen much faster than internal promotions, and often they happen slower!
This post has some big gaps. Who is this for? When is it relevant?
The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.
Excerpting:
> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.
If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job
So the rules of promotions:
1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable
2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")
3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)
^ https://www.noidea.dog/glue
I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.
The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".
Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.
Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).
In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".
I totally agree with you.
The trick is that:
1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).
2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")
That’s addressed in the article by the person who identified a need and came up with both a proposal and estimate to address it.
Now if that person just implemented completely with no feedback that would be very dangerous as it might not work, take longer, or management didn’t actually care about it very much. Getting to the point of proposal + estimate then sign off is the sweet spot.
I would encourage everyone to identify when these rules don't apply!
However, I think these rules are generally safer than the claim that you should do something other than what you've said you would do (or, perhaps, other than what your manager has said you will do)
And if you are doing something much more important, there's a new rule which was probably worth emphasizing more: communicate aggressively. Over communicate. If you're doing A but your manager thinks you are doing B, communicate quickly and often about why you are doing A, what the impact is, and when you will get back to B (or whether B should be deprioritized)
On re reading both of our replies I don't think we disagree:
> First, _. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured
And you say:
> Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do
Yes, sure! But if it's not what's expected, then you probably have additional work that is called "communicating impact". And unfortunately, if you want to get promoted, you are going to have to spend some time communicating impact (unless the impact is self-evident, in which case you have already successfully communicated the impact)
> "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it"
This sounds bad to me. Why throw AI output at your colleagues if you haven't verified it?
There are two things here:
1. Sharing ai generated content is fine if you tell everyone what it is (I recommend also sharing prompts).
2. Ymmv, but my manager would want to know "roughly how much work would this be?" I don't think it's worth it for you to spend very much time answering that question _unless you're actually going to do the work_. This means I'm saying 2 things: first: if it's free for you, you should convey how difficult your proposal is. Very rough buckets are ok if they're pretty close. Second: an easy way for it to be free for you is to prompt codex, and I expect you will do a better job prompting the answer than your manager will
Reading the original post, I also felt it was kind of missing exactly that: when this advice would not actually apply?
The linked article here aligns very well with some of my thoughts. Esp in the example described I would say that, if you find yourself filling too many or too big gaps, maybe think why these gaps exist there in the first place. You may just so happen to fill a void that nobody actually cares much about getting it filled (or is able to get it filled), even if it is work that needs to be done to get projects running, even if people recognize that, even if it actually brings results. Sometimes some may not really understand what brings the results, even if everybody likes results in the end.
Everything you describe is still very much IC work. Nothing that will signal you are ready for management responsibilities.
For those kinds of roles you want to demonstrate you can communicate with and organize a group of people to accomplish an important task.
Sure, at this point, substitute in whatever responsibilities are given to the role you're seeking:
> If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work
Fwiw, most tech companies do not consider eng management to be a promotion. The path to becoming a manager is thus "figure out that you want to be a manager, discuss how such a transition would look with your manager, etc"
That said, if you're not already earning the trust of your team (you do the things you say you'll do, etc) you will not have an opportunity to manage
Oh man, this is bad advice. So, maybe one manager said it... but having been a CTO/dev manager, I will say that having to deal with people trying to do a job that isn't their job is a royal pain in the ass. I have had to deal with this several times, both as someone on the sidelines and as the manager responsible.
When I was a CTO it ultimately required the talk: "It's MY job to manage dev resources and figure out what levers we push where with our limited money. When you try to do a different job then you got hired for, you screw that all up and set me and the company up for failure. If you don't want to do your job, you need to look for another one"
It definitely didn't make me want to promote those people.
A much better approach is to talk to your manager and skip manager about what great career development looks like to them. And if there is no path and that's what you're after, leave. (Lots of good jobs out there that just don't have this path for perfectly good business reasons, or the funnell is too full.)
Consider the possibility that their initiative was not the problem, the problem was that they were not aligned with you.
They were doing things you didn’t want, which made your job harder. But if they were doing things you did want, they would have made your life easier. Because then you would not have to do them.
Alignment with a superior is one part of every job, in fact the higher you go the more important it is. To be clear, alignment means they know what you want done without asking every time. It means they understand your mindset, strategy, and goals. I think it’s coachable to some degree, but some people just don’t seem to get it.
My advice is a little different. It’s make the life of your boss insanely easy. Similar in nature to post but slightly different optimization function. Don’t over communicate, communicate just the right amount. Anticipate questions. Don’t create any friction for them and be really helpful. Some of my people will anticipate things and be proactive. I love that and I constantly push to get them promoted.
Ive adopted this mindset recently and it really does work. That being said i feel it turns me into a bit of a “yes man”. I wish there was more room for more of my authentic personality
I am a longtime lurker. I signed up to say this: Never work extra without being paid extra. You can easily work your butt off and never get anything.
Sure, the boss and the company would like you to work extra, but when did the company ever pay you extra up front for work you—perhaps—would deliver at a later time?
You are a business. It’s not sound business to lower your own hourly rate.
Sure, if everything looks 100 percent aligned, buy the pretty girl a drink, but most of the time things are not aligned.
Don’t be the prostitute who expects to get paid later.
Also, if everyone followed this (OPs) advice that would be a problem. This is more suited to someone already being groomed or an employee who is being mismanaged. My employees do not have time to do unassigned work. If they find the time to present a project fully fleshed out the first thing i ask is where did you do this. At work? Problem, my KPIs are not accurate or youre a superstar who is going to walk unless i find room in the budget (unlikely) or start looking for your replacement because there wont be a reward for turning in unassigned work. Did you work on this at home? Problem as well, you are not paid to work at home. We do not want you to work outside of your hours of operation. Why did you do this?
The best promotion advice I have is to pick a great manager who is genuinely motivated to help you advance in your career. You won't get promoted easily by a manager who's checked out or likes counting beans.
Managers like that are few and far between. If you find one, make it clear to them you want to follow them because they'll get snatched from you in no time and be themselves promoted far far away.
How to find said manager? Ask around, do a little org chart recon in Outlook and do some networking. Where is the drama kept to a minimum in the org? What teams seem to be succeeding both internally and across to other teams. Are there teams where the techies are outspoken (positively) within the org and making a name for themselves in the org? Get to know the managers for those teams.
You may have heard people quit when their manager is a tyrant, this is very true! But there is a middling type of manager, not a horrible person, but also one that isn't helping you along either. Maybe plot and scheme on how to gracefully move to other teams you could better contribute to.
While this may work, it just seems like incredibly unhealthy advice to give or to take. People should be able to focus on their work without being expected to take up random side quests, and if there is a career path, make the requirements clear.
> make the requirements clear
idealistic, but more often than not, unrealistic, unfortunately
If your company does not make career growth requirements clear and actionable, your best vector for career growth is changing companies.
most everything is unrealistic if we just assume it to be so and give up on seeing the world in any different way.
Doing work without contributing to identifying what is the most important work to do can be soul killing.
Some people just want to be given exact instructions on what to do. Others find that role very frustrating.
I agree. This outlook also implies a greater degree of meritocracy than usually exists in a competitive corporate environment. Doing a good job and taking initiative sometimes leads to promotions, but it sometimes just leads to more work. Meanwhile, many ladder climbers are busy optimizing for their own success, not the corp's.
You want to leave any company where doing a good job doesn’t lead to raises and promotions, as soon as possible.
Let's assume those requirements aren't made clear. People will still get promoted, based on side quests and initiative. And those people will have demonstrated a lot of important qualities that all the others (who were blocked on lack of requirements) never showed.
So what's the problem again?
My personal experience with this from the manager's perspective: I aim to promote someone as soon as they are ready, but no sooner. If I promote someone who will not succeed against the expectations of the higher leveled title, I'm just setting them up to get fired or "managed out" when they were otherwise perfectly competent in the level they're at. That's ignoring the natural fuzziness and storytelling element of defining and measuring competence, of course, but that's the general idea of where I put the threshold.
"Readiness" means that I believe that after their promotion they will be able to execute at the higher level at least most of the time. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be already doing the higher leveled job, but in practice they do need to show that they can sustain some approximation of it.
Being promoted into obsolescence or into under performing is a death sentence. Some people are perfectly suited for their work and would find their bosses work to be numbing, too complex or too simple for them. Not getting a promotion is not a bad thing (do not mistake raises for a promotion). If the company cannot or will not allocate more to your position then that is a problem as a business, not something you can control. The best case scenario is to find another company who can pay your worth for the skill set presented.
I think the only possible flaw with this idea is you might not know.
I find that my organizational and leadership skills demonstrated in my role suffer when I am working on individual contributor work that requires deep focus and perhaps even isolation.
At the same time, I’ve handled other roles at other companies that required more leadership and team mentorship, where you’d look at my actions and feel more like I was management material. But in my current role with my current responsibilities it’s hard for myself let alone someone else to imagine that I would make an effective leader, since my job basically dictates that I don’t do that on a daily basis.
The day to day needs and responsibilities of the business often get in the way of the person actually demonstrating that they will excel when they do something else.
I don’t have any kind of direct solution for this specific dilemma. I think in my situation my manager should make more opportunities available but hasn’t been doing so due to the daily routine of putting out fires.
I’ve had great success “leading” in one business and difficulties in another. I learned what kind of orgs I can be effective at. They’re wildly different imo.
This advice only works at the team level. Beyond that, it’s borderline fantasy. At senior and leadership levels, promotions aren’t rewards for effort, they’re forward looking bets made by people above you, and those people have incentives, blind spots, and egos. Reporting to an insecure director or a clueless manager will quickly disabuse you of the “just do great work” myth.
Also, if the company isn’t growing, none of this matters. You can operate like a CTO all you want and all that happens is more work gets dumped on you for the same pay. Take on stretch work if you’re hungry for it and it’s explicitly acknowledged as next-level responsibility. Otherwise, you’re just volunteering to be exploited.
I think that works well for smaller orgs, but in larger organizations (especially where department headcount growth is not expected) it might be more complicated and more meta/political. I wish that were not the case, but in reality, trying to "do the job" of your manager can backfire.
Those are also companies where both your career and salary will stagnate.
My experience at several large companies I worked for, the promotion comes because the activities are already at the new, higher level. i.e., working at SVP/level 7 when officially at VP/level 6 for a period when the promotion is offered.
Good or bad, this is how the industry I work in promotes.
I think the best approach is to take on extra, above position responsibilities, accountabilities after discussion with superior, after agreeing in writing that this is part of a path to promotion.
I agree. I'd argue that if you can't start a conversation with your superior about future promotions and job goals, you're probably not gonna get that promotion anyway.
Your manager is gonna be the one asking their own manager to pay you more, and will be the one doing reviews.
Also: stepping on other people's toes can crush team morale, which can sure delay promotions. Saw it happening. Keeping the manager in the loop is a good way to avoid it.
Often you need not only to be at the higher level, but someone to call out that if they don't promote you you might leave. I've seen a lot cases (at many companies) where one person that everyone knows is good quitting for a promotion gets a dozen others promoted in the next few months. So if you realize you are not getting a promotion your leaving may be the trigger to get your coworkers promoted.
Correct. The best way to be promoted / given more money is to be a cherished contributor and be deemed a flight risk.
True, that can happen, but that feels toxic. A threat by the employee will always breed some negative feelings towards the employee, even if it is subconscious.
I am just writing about relatively sane, stable organization where the employer-employee relationship is stable and acceptable.
I think you (and the other) misunderstood. You are not threatening to leave here! Either you actually leave (their first notice is your two weeks), or someone else does and the company realizes if they don't promote good people fast those others will take the same hint and leave.
I agree that threatening to leave is a bad thing. Either get out or be content where you are: middle grounds do nobody any good.
But indicating you are hoping to be promoted is expected and encouraged at any functional and growing organization.
> Do it for six months, not six days.
Six months of unpaid stress for doing your managers job for a glimpse (not given!) promotion. You're a great manager, worked with a guy like you – never again.
If you read this and you're at the start of your journey, then heed my warning: nothing good comes out of this ever.
> Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap.
That's not what I learned from work. I saw people with skill way beyond their position hang around companies getting jack shit before they eventually got bored and left, and then other people getting thrust into seniority for arbitrary reasons:
> Oh, you got hired just three weeks ago? Well the rest of the team has just quit, so I guess you're in charge now.
> Corporate are trying to fix the gender imbalance in the c-suite, you're a woman, you want to be an executive?
Both of those people _were_ very good at what they did, but so were the other people who didn't get those arbitrary events.
Good advice. Doesn't work in bad culture.
I once was told "we cannot promote you because the work you've done checks the boxes for 2 rolls above you and does not check the boxes for your next roll"
also an insecure/jealous manager will see you as a threat and do everything to make you ineffective, miserable, and quit
IME, taking on extra responsibility doesn't get you promoted. However, you can take it on and then find a new job with a better salary where the responsibility you added is part of the expectation.
The blog is not terrible advice, but "getting promoted" just seems like a waste of time and effort nowadays. To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.
To get hired away from Google to an L6-equivalent role at Meta (or whereever) you need to get halfway through one L6 project and do a few hours of interviewing. There's no comparison in the level of effort. (And I'm not picking on Google here. I think it's the same or worse nearly everywhere.)
It's a real problem. I saw people boomerang back to Google after 18 months at one or even two levels higher, much faster than they could have been promoted internally.
The changes to compensation also make it worse.
The 85%ile of L used to be above that of the lowest 15%ile of L+1 so in the year that you demonstrate L+1 you'll get compensated as L+1.
Now, the 85%ile of L is less than that of the lowest 15%ile of L+1 so until you actually get promoted there's no real compensation difference. Which makes leaving for L+1 so much more attractive (and also going above-and-beyond less attractive).
[dead]
This seems to be a near universal phenomenon and I wonder if there is any behavioral research explaining it.
> To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.
100% agreed. Just as importantly, you also need to be aware of what type of an environment you are in and plan accordingly.
Sometimes, you are just in an environment where it is somewhere between extremely improbable and nearly impossible to get promoted. At that point, you would be better served to put more effort into changing that environment, instead of chasing the grind. I learned that one the hard way a few years ago, at, ironically, Google.
I was on track to a promo, got a documented track record, got the backing of multiple managers + my team lead, etc. But guess what? Another reorg happened shortly before the cutoff for the review cycle, i got a new manager who literally just met me for the first time, and my chances tanked to essentially zero (which is understandable, because I don’t see how a manager who just discovered my existence a week prior would be able to effectively back my promo package). Since then, I had an average of 3-5 major reorgs and 1-2 manager changes per year. As I came to eventually realize, this type of a dysfunctional environment wasn’t conductive to a good career velocity.
Needless to say, my decision to just put my head in the sand and grind harder to compensate for this kind of organizational instability was stupid. It would’ve definitely been a better bet (in terms of time/effort, career trajectory, and compensation) to put even just a portion of that effort into changing my environment, as opposed to trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction with raw work effort.
TLDR: if you care about having a good promotion velocity, focus on the biggest blocker in your specific situation. Whether it is the lack of track record demonstrating sustained effort at the L+1 level, or your environment being dysfunctional in ways that make promotions improbable, etc. Just gotta keep the eyes on the prize, and pick the solutions that are the most appropriate for your individual situation (instead of blindly just doing "XYZ because I read that it was a great career advice" in a single-minded manner).
I'm not sure if I'm off base here, but at this point google is a 20yo company with a massive existing revenue, I don't think the company is growing itself as much as it is maintaining its revenue and moat, in a similar fashion, you will be a promotion not for doing stuff, but just by dedicating years of your life in exchange for stability.
With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.
What engineering discipline?
Just do your job. Don't stress out trying to do your boss's job. Your department is likely to be off shored or made redundant in a merger anyway.
I don't agree with this advice at all. Do the work you're paid to do - no more, and no less. In my experience, working extra doesn't actually get you more respect from an employer. Often times, it's the opposite.
Back when I was working as salaried employee, I never asked for a promotion or a raise. Not once. But I got them! Meanwhile, I watched coworkers spend years fighting for promotions, taking on so much more work than I would ever agree to, and were repeatedly denied. Eventually, they would give up and get a job elsewhere. Some did manage to get promoted, but it was grueling.
These coworkers weren't less skilled than I was. I would say many of them were actually more capable, despite my position being ranked higher.
A lot of comments here are talking about "healthy" work cultures and whatnot. I worked for medium-sized tech companies that you've heard of with great engineering cultures and a healthy approach to work-life balance. I don't believe that "healthy" results in getting recognized for going above and beyond.
Others are mentioning office politics. I did not befriend coworkers, did not make enemies, etc. I simply did my work.
I'm sure many of you have had the experience that if you make a mistake—not necessarily at work, but just in general—and then apologize profusely, you will be treated worse than if you were more casual or didn't even apologize at all. I find that making yourself "smaller" will often result in people taking advantage of you. Similarly, it seems to me that working super hard will simply raise people's baseline expectations of you, and they will exploit that. This isn't necessarily a conscious thing on behalf of your boss(es), but it's absolutely something that happens.
Given all of that, my advice is to simply do your job. Over time, you will gain more experience, and that experience will potentially turn into promotions naturally. If not, then get a new job. Note however, that I'm not a proponent of frequent job hopping (I never spent less than three years at a company).
If you're not self-employed, then your work is making someone else rich. No need to make them even richer if you're not getting compensated for it.
For me the "responsibility first" part is the most important. I care more that you are willing to take responsibility at a higher level than your absolute performance at what you do. Because if you take responsibility you might make mistakes but you will fix them. But if you make mistakes and don't fix them, then giving you more autonomy is a liability. Fixing mistakes often involves demonstrating many aspects of operating at a higher level as well - you take the lead on communicating with other teams about the mistake, addressing the impact, apologising for any harm caused.
For me, taking responsibility is one of those necessary (but not sufficient) things I have to see before I will consider a promotion (at least, a genuine one where someone actually operates at a higher level with more autonomy).
There are a lot of factors that go into achieving success in the workplace. There are usually competing ideas of what success is to you, versus what it is to the one rating you or paying you. You have to, at some level, appear to be good at something they think is good to have around. Sometimes that aligns with what you think is good, sometimes it doesn’t.
Of course the advice in OP is going to be relative, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to have a good sense of what your immediate does, how they think, what metrics they value, etc. If not for your own advancement- keeping immediate leadership off tilt can greatly increase QOL, or vice-versa. I personally would love to have leadership above me that I think "damn, I'd like to be a little more like that guy" but in almost 20 years of being in the workforce, including military and the likes, that kind of leadership has been hard to come by.
This is just recycled advice that's been given for 30+ years. "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" etc. The thing is this only really "works" in healthy or semi-healthy environments. You could just as easily have an infantile, poorly qualified, easily threatened middle manager above you that will perceive this kind of behavior as an attack and take the legs out from under you in ways that you have very little control over (has happened to me)
Then the only way to progress your career is to leave the company.
In many cases, yes, sometimes it involves a parallel move to a different part of the company, or the manager moving on - problem is when you're in that situation it may not be obvious for literally years until it becomes very obvious in an instant, and by that point, your options may be more limited.
This sounds like surface level wisdom if you are in your earlier career. I see several problems with this advice, but here is the most obvious one: this only works if you want to become a manager.
It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.
Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).
this is recommending an employee work outside their scope in the hopes of getting promoted. it really depends on the company culture and if internal promotions are common otherwise it's just you doing your manager's work, and i don't see why anyone should be taking on more responsbilities without getting paid for it.
This works well if your company culture doesn’t abhor an IC or manager trying to push for improvements in places that are not their responsibility.
Unfortunately there are a lot of places that do dislike this - and it may result in you getting fired instead of promoted :)
Sounds like a company set up for failure.
In some cases, yeah, but in others it just sounds like a company with a lot of regulatory constraints and a strong "need to know" culture. Internal moat building often reflects in their business model as well. Not that I'd like to work in that environment, but I've seen it work and work well.
This is one of the best pieces of career advice one can give, and I’ve had my fair share of experience that this works very well.
Most people wait to be promoted to the title/designation to do the work of that role. However, if you want to avoid friction when asked, “Why should I promote you to this role?”, you should already be doing the job and proving you can do it.
I once saw a QA tester tinkering with the front-end code, fixing the bugs himself, then went to the engineer and pointed out where to fix. When asked if he wanted to become a front-end engineer, I realized he was waiting for an opportunity to be promoted. So, I repeated my usual advice: if you want to be promoted, be already doing that role. He started learning, and work on front-end work besides his QA work. When he asked to be promoted, it was just a title change and a pay raise. He went on to lead the Product Design Team at a major oil company (at a branch in Bangalore, India). A Good photographer, and always has an eye for design.
Similar story of an engineer waiting to be promoted to a Lead Architect. Advised him to start doing it way before talking about his promotion. I don't remember his promotion in the team I was working but heard back that he was easily gotten to that position and a big salary jump at a new company (a new city). I once saw him working in the plane we were flying together, while I was sleeping. I think he deployed when we landed.
In touch with both, and lot others. None that I had advised on doing the role above them have regretted.
"front-end engineer"
Stop saying engineer when you mean programmer.
Good advice, in general. But there is a risk here, which is that you're encouraging people to do something which isn't their job.
Are you sure you don't want this person working on the things they are supposed to be working on?
Further, even if it all goes well, you're encouraging someone to do a more stressful job and not (yet) compensating them. Given the fact that you can't practically promote everyone you want, this risks your senior-with-junior-title feeling taken advantage of and prone to look for their title elsewhere.
Yeah this would get an immediate “stay in your lane” warning where I work
Which means there is very little chance of you getting promoted in your company, and probably a low ceiling on your compensation I would guess.
Yup
This is how I eventually ended up being CTO and eventually CEO. I wanted the overall business to succeed.
My early boss had a different approach. If you want a promotion, you need to have people in place who can do your job. That was touchy. If I had people capable of doing my job, what would happen when we do layoffs (which happened regularly)? But it was also through a period of strong growth, so the boss needed proven people in place to take on new opportunities. Working for a firm during its strong growth phase is very different from trying to climb a 10,000-deep corporate ladder.
A person who can train up their staff can do so again and again. A junior staff who’s been trained up may or may not be able to help others grow.
Leveling up your staff is an incredibly valuable skill in a business, way more valuable than whatever hard facts or skills you teach them.
I saw such a team of 3 people, who earns $500,000 in month.
Advice: solve business bottlenecks.
Their approach: - research the biggest problem in a company with as less communication as possible - prepare a full, easy plan well designed. They used slides and a designer. - split the plan on parts and first part is already with a nice designed demo. Make sure a founder/boss’s work is only pay and say yes. Zero headache. - make a meeting and pitch it, so a founder/boss can’t say no
I don't want to take my boss's place, though. I don't want to manage people, I want to address problems on a broader scope than I'm currently in a position to do.
> "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
When I was a junior, mid, and starting senior level developer, I was so focused on getting ahead, and I would’ve listened intently to this.
The reality is though that most managers and principal or higher devs are great with you taking on responsibility if you’re ready for it, and making mistakes and learning is often fine, but when you stop respecting those with more experience and start working around them, they’re not going to be happy.
My advice: take on responsibilities and do the work, but always respect others. You will never regret giving someone enough respect. If you have a heart or a brain, you will almost certainly regret not treating someone with respect; it will haunt you, even if you one day apologize to them.
This is only good advice if your company has high profit margins or funding and an expectation of growth, or your manager is extremely kind and trusting, or there are signs your manager is about to be fired/reorged and consultants or higher ups are asking if you want to replace them. More established industries or stagnating companies with low profit margin and no VC backing do not have a lot of room at the top, there are "negative selection" processes for management, and trying to do your boss's job is likely to be seen as insubordination. In those organizations the managers keep their job not by excelling at it (typically they would have leveled out due to the Peter principle) but by actively culling threats, and have all kinds of dirty tricks they can use to get rid of you if you show too much initiative.
I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.
This is nonsense to get you to work more for the same pay.
Its good to do this to get an idea of what it means to work on a higher level but it WILL NOT get you promoted.
Promotion is about leverage. What can you supply that no one else can and thats crucial for your bosses-boss's success?
Stop thinking execution - its exactly the opposite of that.
Can you recruit people from other organizations, can you create a new product, work with every part fo the comapny, evangelize the company externally, attract capital ...
Make clear what your goals are to your manager, brainstorm with your manager what kind of specific work would lead them to recommend you for promotion. Then propose that specific work, get them to agree, deliver the work, and hold them to their agreement. Ideally talk to other stakeholders/skip-levels since promotions are usually by committee and you want as many allies as you can in the room.
You also want to figure out if it even makes sense to go for a promotion, if the organization isn't growing - it's going to be a lot harder/impossible to make it.
It also may not be financially worth it if you care about work-life-balance. It might be worth it to get paid 50-70% as much but not have to spend your day in back to back meetings. It may even pencil the same if you consider hourly rates and taxes.
If you want to get promoted, you need a succession plan. You need to train up the person who will be the new you. If you're important enough to be promoted, you're too important to replace, so you'll be stuck where you are until you have a successor in place. By doing this you automatically demonstrate leadership.
It's like this: if you want to become a certain kind of person, start now. If you want to be a writer, start writing now. This doesn't just apply to career advancement; it almost applies to everything.
The best promotion advice I ever received is that you can’t be promoted, if you can’t be replaced.
On a tangential note, I have a concern with all such advices from a technology standpoint. These are all ways to understand the rules and constraints for upward mobility and make them work for you. More and more people are bubbling up in technology roles and roles impacting the long term outcome for technology by using the ~smart/outcome driven/cheat sheet. Building thoughtful systems require long term vision and commitments, not sure if any of this fits in that picture though. Lately everything is just A MVP.
Works for great company with amazing culture.
But what about insecure managers, jealousy managers, and managers who reward folks who are loyal to them or based on same region/country?
What horrible advice. Stop telling people to work harder without compensation. This isn't simply a matter of choice, it hurts the collective workforce. This isn't a charity, this is our livelihoods!
This was always my secret to getting a job I’m not qualified for on paper.
At one point early in my career the old engineer left. I quickly stepped in “just until they hired somebody qualified”. Back then, a 4 year CS degree was required to get the job.
For reasons I can’t recall, we couldn’t hire someone for 6 months. My boss and I had a meeting with HR where he pleaded my case to get me hired. The HR director was actually yelling that I wasn’t qualified.
My boss calmly replied “He’s been doing it for the past 6 months. He’s actually been making improvements. Remember that process of yours that suddenly got a lot better? He did that.” I ended up getting hired right there. There was further drama about me being at my pay scale without a degree but my boss shielded me from much of it.
For that 6 months and for another 12 months after, I probably spent 18 hours a day working or learning to get up to speed. I was single and motivated so it worked out. Loved that boss.
That was many decades ago so I keep an eye out for that spark among my colleagues. I occasionally see it but for the most part, they are much more ambitious than I was and that warms my heart. (Two of them started companies you’ve heard of and cashed out)
This matches my experience. I’ve hired more than 30 people, and only a handful really stayed and made an impact. The difference was never title or position, it was who actually took responsibility when things were unclear or hard. Roles can be assigned, but ownership can’t.
This is also documented in an old 1-page military paper called the "Doctrine of Completed Staff Work"
Good advise. And old one too. In India it's summed up as - "Your job is to make your boss' job easier".
My best advice is to be likeable and just barely incompetent. You will get more money and less work.
Why do you work you’re not paid to do? The exact job of a manager is to handle the staff development. If you’re not doing that then what are you getting paid for?
Absolutely, but also you need to make sure you take on the strategical work of your manager and not the typical day 2 day stuff at operational/expected level, you need to do stuff above your waist line.
I liked the article and it’s right, but at the end of the day you also need to make sure your manager puts you up for promotion and that he is allowed by their management as well.
This stuff is so difficult because it's all situational. In my first job I got hired into a small team, within a year or so my boss quit. I essentially stepped into that job. But in order to be the manager of that team you needed ot be a certain level of seniority, so I was doing the job, but I couldn't have the title or the money. I talked to my manager and made clear that I wanted the job and asked how I get there. The answer was that I needed to be a grade 7 and I was only a (new) grade 5, and since there are only a handful of promotions they can give each year, all things being equal I would get promoted to the seniority level needed to be doing that job in about 6-10 years.
I was essentially doing what this article was advising, but because of the corporate structure I was in, I was just volunteering to be taken advantage of. The correct strategy actually was just to leave. I wasn't going to be successful in that structure, it wasn't a meritocracy and the business results over time went how you would expect. In the end I leverage a job offer to put myself on track to get into that role within 2 years, but in reality that was 2 years wasted, I should've left immediately.
This is somewhat the oldest advice in the book: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have."
In that case, woodworking/homelessness is the job I want.
> What he meant was simpler and more powerful: start doing the job before you have the title. Take on more responsibility before you're officially given it.
protip: this won't get you promoted, won't get you any accolades within the company, and will more like get you on a Performance Improvement Plan
if you want to get promoted, get a offer at another company and take that offer
if you want a fat bonus, if your company has a formal bonus structure, do other's people's work for them while potentially neglecting your own
If a person is profitable to have around, than the conversation is simple:
1. Company has money people may want
2. People have unique skills a company needs to profit
3. Everything else is 100% unrelated BS
On average, every software developer brings in >$1.3m USD/year in additional revenue. If you are being exploited, than just find a better gig someplace better... as it is usually easier than advancing out of a critical role.
Salaries with legal encumbrances are usually just a terrible deal in the long-term. =3
Really good advice, and honestly wish I had known this at the start of my career. It makes a lot of sense, exactly because proactiveness is the secret sauce to a lot of successes in life.
If your boss tells you explicitly that this is ok, then go ahead. And also if they don't tell you this, it might be ok too. But there's scenarios were you are being paid to do a very specific job, and trying to get promoted is a form of escapism for many and it can be an organizational problem.
In argentina we have a saying "Too much chief for too few indians"(as in indigenous people), everyone wants to be the boss, no one wants to do the dishes.
I've been a victim of this, and it especially was a problem when my actual role responsibilities suffered, but even if I managed to fulfill my responsibilities perfectly, it caused friction and a command chain confusion. (especially when other people tried to compete for a promotion as well)
Interesting... brazilian portuguese has this exact same saying, though it's rarely used. "Muito cacique pra pouco índio".
But but
I don't want a promotion. I don't want a new role.
I want more money to keep doing what I already do.
Try to get your boss promoted!
It's hard for me to take advice like this seriously when, in my experience, things like budget and manager's social influence is more deciding in whether you get promoted or not than whatever work you did.
This advice has worked very well for me.
But but but, in some scenarios it has been at the expense of my well being. It’s not good to take on more work and not let go of some of the things you’re currently doing. Moreover, finding “permission” from your boss to let those things go can be challenging.
I’ve found this works best when you and your boss agree on the problem you’re stepping into (not necessarily your solution). It may be that you need to stick your neck out and suffer for awhile for them to see your perspective.
When you’re on the same page about what you’re solving, a good manager will clear room for you.
Maybe it’s just me, but is there anyone else who does NOT want to be promoted and is just happy to craft code day and night?
Standard promo advice tbh. Do the job and then ask for it. Except there's a brief moment when you are adding value not in proportion to your compensation which will be infuriating. Sometimes its also possible you end up stagnant where you keep performing at a higher level and never get the job. My advice is to always check your market value by talking to recruiters and/or HMs outside of your company. That way once you have the relevant bullets on your resume, either you get the promotion or you just leave. Hedge your bets.
Worst case is those responsibilities you took on can be added to your resume to find a higher level job at a different company.
So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advice. But still this article presumes a lot.
In my experience, managers will naturally partition their reports into three buckets: their stars, their problems and their worker bees. The worker bees tend to be ignored. They're doing fine. They're getting on with whatever they've been told to do or possibly what they've found to do. They're not going to create any problems. The problems are the underperformers. These are people who create problems and/or are at risk of getting a subpar performance rating.
Now there are lots of reasons that someone can be a problem. I tend to believe that any problem just hasn't found the right fit yet and, until proven otherwise, problems are a failure in management. That tends to be a minority view in practice. It's more common to simply throw people in the deep end and sink or swim because that takes much less overhead. You will see this as teams who have a lot of churn but only in part of the team. In particularly toxic environments, savvy managers will game the system by having a sacrificial anode position. They hire someone to take the bad rating they have to give to protect the rest of the team.
And then there are the stars. These are the people you expect to grow and be promoted. More often than not however they are chosen rather than demonstrating their potential. I've seen someone shine when their director is actively trying to sabotage them but that's rare.
Your stars will get the better projects. Your problems will get the worse ones. If a given project is a success or not will largely come down to perception not reality.
The point I'm getting to is that despite all the process put around this at large companies like performance ratings, feedback, calibration, promo committees, etc the majority of all this is vibes based.
So back to the "take my job" advice. If someone is viewed as a star, that's great advice. For anyone else, you might get negative feedback about not doing your actual job, not being a team player and so on. I've seen it happen a million times.
And here's the dirty little secret of it all: this is where the racism, sexism and ableism sneaks in. It's usually not that direct but Stanford grads (as just one example) will tend to vibe with other Stanford grads. They have common experience, probably common professors and so on. Same for MIT. Or CMU. Or UW. Or Waterloo. And so on.
So all of the biases that go into the selection process for those institutions will bleed into the tech space.
And this kind of environment is much worse for anyone on the spectrum because allistic people will be inclined to dislike from the start for no reason and that's going to hurt how they're viewed (ie as a star, a worker bee or a problem) and their performance ratings.
Because all of this is ultimately just a popularity contest with very few exceptions. I've seen multiple people finagle their way to Senior STaff SWE on just vibes.
And all of this gets worse since the tech sector has joined Corporate America in being in permanet layoff mode. The Welchian "up or out" philosophy has taken hold in Big Tech where there are quotas of 5-10% of the workforce have to get subpar ratings every year and that tends to kill their careers at that company. This turns the entire workplace even more into an exercise in social engineering.
Yeah the only solution to avoid this is to find a company where building and selling a product actually matters. In large companies it’s too easy to fudge the connection between individual contributions and financial impact.
If you’re not looking to become a founder, companies right around 100 employees is the sweet spot in my (very limited) experience.
Smells like LLM written. Maybe useful advice though. Who actually writes the hyphen in compound modifiers (or even knows what that is)? E.g. "team-level" instead of "team level".
> I couldn't have been happier.
And phrases like this.
Definitely, although maybe it's ok here. I'm not sure. The opening paragraph doesn't feel like it. The rest could be condensed to 1 or 2 paragraphs and it would better communicate the idea.
It's not too bad because it's not too long, but I think it's worse than if the human had just written a second part to the post about the length of the first part.
Notice there's all these needless sections that have the LLM-form.
> What "Taking the Position" Actually Looks Like
> Why Sustained Performance Is What Counts
> The Responsibility-First Mindset
And each has this opening paragraph setup then a one sentence paragraph contradicting or reinforcing it, which is simultaneously punchy and pure fluff.
> I couldn't have been happier.
> And I mean sustained.
> But that's backward.
I can't really tell how much the author cares about any given bit of text beyond the starting paragraph because it's all expressed with too many words that don't say anything, but just evoke the marketing/linkedin-speak, giving everything too much weight.
good observations of AIGC form here
Continually sad to see each day that the vast majority of users cannot classify
Honestly that just seems like normal English.
To refer to something as "team-level" seems so absurdly unspectacular, relative to the other kinds of signals that exist for sussing out AI writing, that I'm surprised it was worthy of mentioning at all.
It's proper grammar but I have only ever seen journalists use it. It is a strong signal in my experience
Maybe so but in that case hats off to the LLM for writing a pretty good article.
Uh. I'd use a hyphen there. I'm not an LLM. At least, I don't think I am. But, who knows?
Sorry but what year and working environment is this post from? Things have radically changed in the last 5 years.
^this 100%
"Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap. You've got to show that you're capable of handling the responsibility for a sustained period of time."
Some classic management gaslighting. You have to work for a few years at the level of the higher position to get it. I will trust your work at this level, profit off of it, hold you responsible for it but not pay you appropriately for it. It's always the compensation piece that takes time.
"Seriously, ref, I'm good enough to win. No need to play the game, you can just hand me the gold medal now!"
Not really related to what I said but I'll bite. Let me try phrasing it in a different way, if someone asked you to, in addition to doing your own job, do someone elses, but instead of paying you for that additional work said you'd get great "exposure" and a future reward, would you jump at that chance?
I know many people that have because they care, they are hungry, they want to advance, they can do higher level things and want to prove themselves, etc. and the vast majority of them have gotten nothing for their trouble but extra work. We live in a world where working hard is always encouraged and its virtues extolled but rarely rewarded.
Except work is nothing like professional sport. Your example is detached from reality.
It's more like being hired as a plumber and start doing secretary work for your boss for free.
There's a price tag on your services, why would give it out for free for some nebulous chance of getting a promo? Peak stupidity.
How's the boss going to know you can do secretarial stuff if he hired you as a plumber?
You go to the boss and you say you want to become a secretary. You and your boss outline a path with clear road and compensation for the effort.
This belongs to the "shit that never happened" list.
I’ve participated and appealed to promotions committees at a few big tech companies and the principle for achieving the promotion is sustained performance for a half or 2 at the next level, judged by a number of dimensions. A couple drivers are revenue impact, business direction, or how well you are enabling others to succeed.
If the staff is large enough, calibrations are done to find template team members at the higher level, to make it very clear that the candidates performance is meeting that higher bar.
I think most ICs think “I’ve been working hard, I deserve a promotion”. A better barometer is whether your peers assume you are already at that higher level without knowing your rank.
The problem is when you reach SR the next step is often so far removed that you can't have that impact without not doing your real job. A jr to mid-level engineer: just be better at what you do. However Sr to the next level is a whole different way of working and you can't do those things and also write the code that a sr is expected to write.
Hmm maybe this is a good use case for LLMs to focus more on those higher level objectives.
Until the productivity boost of using LLMs well is just assumed for all ICs.
that's what the money's for
This is peak office cuckoldry. Please mr sir, may I have more work and responsibility for the same pay! Please sir, I am hungry for more work and stress!
This site is so detached from reality sometimes its hard to even say anything.
I fear Maduro suggested this to Trump.
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some personal advice i recently learned is to show youre boss's boss if you really want to be promoted
ive been "trying to take my boss's position" for a few years and he really appreciates it. but during my last review my boss's boss pointed said he wasnt aware of any of this. i was leaving him off all my cc lists because i figured he didnt want the cluttered inbos. he said the opposite, he thought i wasnt following up and doing my job
all my effort was actually having a negative effect in the perspective of the decision maker. hopefully i knock his socks off this year since apparently the bars been lowered to the floor
These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.
Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?
TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:
The concerns in these types of posts are just so... different.If the CTO is setting their position as the goal, we're talking about the managerial ladder.
ICs and specialists (I see product managers and directors as specialists as well) should have other options, but if all you're managing is people, getting more people under you is usually the only path forward.