[zelda420]

Throughout my long career in the tech industry, from established giants like Oracle to a hyper-growth pre-IPO Airbnb, I've observed a consistent pattern: engineers rarely advance more than one level above their initial hiring position, regardless of their performance or tenure.

The only exception were juniors who could rise to a senior. But senior to staff, or whatever you want to call it is almost unheard of unless you jump ship.

[mattgreenrocks]

It's a professional version of "a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives."

Familiarity begets being taken for granted, and undervaluation, which hurts one's promotion case.

[bathtub365]

Over about 10 years I moved from mid level developer to director (through senior, team lead, engineering manager, sr engineering manager) at the same company. It was a small company that grew and the founders/high level engineers actually saw the value in retaining and growing people and had interesting enough work to keep people from getting bored, so we had high retention.

Many of these promotions were out of cycle (because there was no cycle) and now that I’m at a bigger company I see how this would be much more difficult. There seems to be little interest in really retaining and growing engineering talent and all promotions are at the mercy of an entrenched HR org that doesn’t understand the work that anyone is doing. On top of that budgets are generally much tighter now than I’ve ever seen during my career.

It may still be possible to do this at smaller companies, with the obvious caveat that there’s always the danger of title inflation, though now that I’m at a bigger company I feel like I see more title inflation around me than I ever did at the smaller company. There are also entrenched structures of power that are obviously working against the success of the company and are causing good people to leave.

I do wonder if more companies embraced promotions it would lead to a healthier organizational culture in general since you’d have more people around who were involved in creating it.

[jimbokun]

It seems like the simplest reason for the discrepancy in behaviors is that in the small company, the higher level roles came into being organically as the company grew. Where as at the already established large company, to get a higher level role you almost have to take it from someone else. Or wait for a vacancy.

[jakey_bakey]

Lol I have had one promotion in my life and it was mid-Junior

That said, I have only moved jobs 2x in 9 years (my second startup failing doesn't count)

[WWLink]

Just over 10 years in space stuff, I have noticed exactly the same thing.

[dsq]

What kind of "space stuff"? Spacex/blue origin/nasa?

[greatpostman]

Yup. You get Bucketed and there is no growth

[Aurornis]

> The only exception were juniors

The article mentions being an early career junior in the first few sentences.