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After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you need an executive sponsor. VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too m

After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you need an executive sponsor. VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too many reports. And if you're assigned unsexy work like keeping the trains running, well the better you do your job ironically the more you become like wallpaper. I'm not saying you have to be a kissa*, although that does work at a remarkable number of companies, I'm saying you have to make yourself known to a person with power. Otherwise you're just a name and easy to reject. You want to believe in meritocracy but in my experience the correlation between effectiveness and promotions is weak to nonexistent. If you want to get promoted -- besides doing a good job (and sometimes not even then) -- the reality is you probably have to market yourself upwards. The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? I'm guessing a lot of it is how they 'feel' about someone. But these days as a developer the sad reality is you probably need to switch jobs every 3-5 years if you want to keep moving upwards, unless you're really lucky.

greedo 9y ago
I've heard this referred to as having a 'rabbi' who can help you navigate the political seas of a company.
eqdw 9y ago
At first glance I didn't realize that "kissa" was a censored curse word, and I thought that "kissa" was a new slang for "kiss-a*" So I'd like to propose a new slang term, "kissa"...
jldugger 9y ago
> The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? The answer, from what I gather, is yes. The hiring / promotion committees are essentially an anonymous collection of fellow engineers, perhaps a step higher than you, but somewhat random in composition. As such, there is no reliable way to grease hands or build meaningful relationships with the wide range of people who might be on your committee. The larger problem OP faces is simple: his senior engineer projects are not being protected by his manager. And possibly sabotaged indirectly by executives above. In that sense, he does need an executive sponsor, simply to protect the project assignments he needs to build his stone cold anonymous metrics case.
- ordinaryperson 9y ago
  You can't befriend everybody, true, which is why you should identify one senior executive you think can help and market yourself to him or her (again, I wish it didn't work this way, but it seems to). You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow engineers. Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to your soft skills. But yes, agree with your second point that it's up to the manager to protect his projects or champion his employees.
  - jldugger 9y ago
    Anywhere else, yea, but at Google specifically, not an option. Executives don't override the committee, except maybe Larry and Sergey. And if your advice is 'be friends with the CEO', I'm sure that'll scale right up. The good news is that, based on reports from Googlers here, it sounds like the system is changing for the lower promotion tiers.
    - ordinaryperson 9y ago
      How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not what I wrote. It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the inside. You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio. But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions. If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.
      - jldugger 9y ago
        I didn't say the committee was numerical, though their reputation is such. OP's challenge is that Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts who you'll likely never have met, because the company is 100k engineers, and working on your small corner of Maps or whatever makes it unlikely you'll have ample opportunity to meet people from Security, or Search or Adwords or Adsense or Golang or Youtube or Nest or any of the myriad of other products besides yours from which the promotion panel is randomly pulled. You're essentially suggesting that to go from say Software Development Engineer 2 to Senior Software Development Engineer, you need to simply schmooze a few thousand coworkers. > But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions. Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management. I don't know panels discuss, but given the odds are that nobody on the panel knows anything about you other than whats in the committee packet, it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered. > If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair. I'm not sure about that. My reading is that the OP left because the committee was saw themselves as numerical, but ended up being pathologically and myopically so. The metrics they see are the ones that can be calculated, often easily. Getting dinged for finding more bugs than you fixed in legacy software, when they mistake known bug counts for actual bug counts. Treating unquantifiable results like unreleased software as invalid. Ignoring necessary but difficult results to quantify like interviewing candidates, documenting code, and writing test suites. Such a pathology can't be solved by knowing the right people, especially not when the system is designed to prevent this exact technique. The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee, it was the one(s) reassigning his team projects every quarter. Or barring that, one at another company.

greedo 9y ago

I've heard this referred to as having a 'rabbi' who can help you navigate the political seas of a company.

eqdw 9y ago

At first glance I didn't realize that "kissa" was a censored curse word, and I thought that "kissa" was a new slang for "kiss-a*" So I'd like to propose a new slang term, "kissa"...

jldugger 9y ago

> The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? The answer, from what I gather, is yes. The hiring / promotion committees are essentially an anonymous collection of fellow engineers, perhaps a step higher than you, but somewhat random in composition. As such, there is no reliable way to grease hands or build meaningful relationships with the wide range of people who might be on your committee. The larger problem OP faces is simple: his senior engineer projects are not being protected by his manager. And possibly sabotaged indirectly by executives above. In that sense, he does need an executive sponsor, simply to protect the project assignments he needs to build his stone cold anonymous metrics case.

ordinaryperson 9y ago
You can't befriend everybody, true, which is why you should identify one senior executive you think can help and market yourself to him or her (again, I wish it didn't work this way, but it seems to). You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow engineers. Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to your soft skills. But yes, agree with your second point that it's up to the manager to protect his projects or champion his employees.
- jldugger 9y ago
  Anywhere else, yea, but at Google specifically, not an option. Executives don't override the committee, except maybe Larry and Sergey. And if your advice is 'be friends with the CEO', I'm sure that'll scale right up. The good news is that, based on reports from Googlers here, it sounds like the system is changing for the lower promotion tiers.
  - ordinaryperson 9y ago
    How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not what I wrote. It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the inside. You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio. But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions. If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.
    - jldugger 9y ago
      I didn't say the committee was numerical, though their reputation is such. OP's challenge is that Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts who you'll likely never have met, because the company is 100k engineers, and working on your small corner of Maps or whatever makes it unlikely you'll have ample opportunity to meet people from Security, or Search or Adwords or Adsense or Golang or Youtube or Nest or any of the myriad of other products besides yours from which the promotion panel is randomly pulled. You're essentially suggesting that to go from say Software Development Engineer 2 to Senior Software Development Engineer, you need to simply schmooze a few thousand coworkers. > But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions. Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management. I don't know panels discuss, but given the odds are that nobody on the panel knows anything about you other than whats in the committee packet, it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered. > If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair. I'm not sure about that. My reading is that the OP left because the committee was saw themselves as numerical, but ended up being pathologically and myopically so. The metrics they see are the ones that can be calculated, often easily. Getting dinged for finding more bugs than you fixed in legacy software, when they mistake known bug counts for actual bug counts. Treating unquantifiable results like unreleased software as invalid. Ignoring necessary but difficult results to quantify like interviewing candidates, documenting code, and writing test suites. Such a pathology can't be solved by knowing the right people, especially not when the system is designed to prevent this exact technique. The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee, it was the one(s) reassigning his team projects every quarter. Or barring that, one at another company.