[gloryjulio]

> 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

[ryandrake]

> 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.

[jkubicek]

> > 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.

[akdas]

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.

[972811]

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

[Magmalgebra]

> 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.

[rkangel]

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.

[9rx]

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.

[singleshot_]

> 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?

[pc86]

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?

[gloryjulio]

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.