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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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".
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.)
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.
> 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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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
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!).
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"
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)
[+] [-] GMoromisato|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|2 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] rendaw|2 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] gloryjulio|2 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] begueradj|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raverbashing|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LiquidSky|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amflare|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Dave_Rosenthal|2 months ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] stillworks|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimbokun|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuamorton|2 months ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] kamaal|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] neumann|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] buzzardbait|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] wrsh07|2 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bluGill|2 months ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] normie3000|2 months ago|reply
This sounds bad to me. Why throw AI output at your colleagues if you haven't verified it?
[+] [-] freehorse|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimbokun|2 months ago|reply
For those kinds of roles you want to demonstrate you can communicate with and organize a group of people to accomplish an important task.
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] ryeguy_24|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] croissant17|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewAnchor|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iainctduncan|2 months ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] ggoo|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|2 months ago|reply
idealistic, but more often than not, unrealistic, unfortunately
[+] [-] jimbokun|2 months ago|reply
Some people just want to be given exact instructions on what to do. Others find that role very frustrating.
[+] [-] cainxinth|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shermantanktop|2 months ago|reply
So what's the problem again?
[+] [-] dwoldrich|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ram_rar|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] munchbunny|2 months ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] dangus|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] away0g|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chaoz_|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] WaitWaitWha|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whstl|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bluGill|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|2 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] wiseowise|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|2 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] angarg12|2 months ago|reply
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!).
[+] [-] ImPleadThe5th|2 months ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] TZubiri|2 months ago|reply
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)