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> I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a

> I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a bit differently. If an individual on my team is working hard, I'm going to keep them where they are because they're getting the job done. Rather, I'm looking to elevate my 10x engineer - not the one that's the doing their job well but the one thats mentoring those around them to do their job well too. An excellent point. This misconception that hard work leads to promotion is widespread, and management doesn't often do enough to dispel it (if they are even aware of it themselves). I think an important step here is to identify the concrete behaviors and competencies needed to advance. In the words of Randall Koutnik: "What does it take to succeed at [your] company beyond 'hard work'?"[0]. [0]https://rkoutnik.com/articles/Questions-to-ask-your-interviewer.html https://rkoutnik.com/articles/Questions-to-ask-your-intervie...

Traster 7y ago
I'll tell you what amazes me: If you look at any reasonably large engineering organisation they will likely have guidance published from HR stating what the criteria are for different job roles, and they'll actually be pretty similar across different organisations. You might be a Senior Software Engineer at one place but called a Staff engineer at another place, but they're broadly comparable, and the seniority criteria show a very clear progression: the more senior you get the more influence you are showing across the organisation, whether that means managing larger projects, mentoring other staff, consulting with other teams on best known practices, or influencing other parts of the company inter-discplinary projects. Almost every large organisation will have a neat table telling you exactly what attributes you need to show. They all show that progression - more influence on the organisation as a whole. And yet every single review cycle there's always a portion of engineers who think they deserve a promotion because their personal work was high quality. It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. It's amazing.
- bluGill 7y ago
  What is more amazing is their managers who have figured out how to work the system are not telling people that. Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go so if they can't get there tell them why. I've wasted years working hard and trying to gain influence only to realize that the areas I was getting influence in didn't matter to anyone so I was condemned to get good jobs but no promotion. It has been hard to let go and find a path with real influence. Where I was going is one of those areas that only seen if not done. Lesson learned though : the guy who created the bad design requiring them to come in right before release and work a weekend is rewarded above the guy who wrote good code that works...
  - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
    > Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go This sounds nice, and from the perspective of the direct report, sure, this is the mindset that you want your managers to have. That said, your manager isn't necessarily incentivized by the company to optimize for this. What's best for the employee isn't necessarily what's best for the company.
    - alexandercrohde 7y ago
      Which is why employees are disincentivized from trusting those managers.
  - nogabebop23 7y ago
    I tell my developers this repeatedly, in the form of "making yourself 10% better is not as good as making everyone you work with 1% better". A few get it and shift towards a "rising tide floats all boats" mentality, the rest do nothing and are perfectly adequate, or agree with me then turn back to solely focusing on self-improvement. The kicker? That 1% universal imporvement is soooo much easier than 10% or even 5% personal improvement. You can help your team become more effective just by (1) commiting to the act of (2) giving a sh!t.
    - bojo 7y ago
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Meh, it's been my experience that those charts are borderline worthless. The truth is promotions are probably only fractionally about performance. A lot of it is budget, creating pr/"buzz" [even if it's proportional to impact], did you happen to be on a revenue-generating team, is there any political risk to promoting you (e.g. would you say the type of things I'm saying right now?). Maybe google or something is different (and I doubt it), but that's less than 1% of engineers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tibiahurried 7y ago
    what makes the difference is: - your boss is influential (politics) - you are lucky enough to work on a high impact/ high visibility project - you play yes man with your boss and please them - how long have you been with the company and the political connections you have made ... quality plays a very small role in promotions ... In all the organizations I have worked for, I expected a promotion within the first 2 years (to then leave on the 3rd anyway :) ). When that did not happen, I simply left and got a salary increase and +1 level anyway. If you are lucky enough to work in a high demand field (like tech) and you are good at it ... you are pretty much in control. Qualified people that get s*t done are always in high demand, just make sure to always be on the top and keep sharpening your skills ;)
    - jdmichal 7y ago
      > you play yes man with your boss and please them You need to be able to read this one. I've gotten a lot of props for being someone by bosses can rely on to challenge them. But I also don't do it for stupid things, and if they seem to not be willing to flinch then I back down.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  > It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. Amazingly, some organizations do not hand every new hire that document on day 1, so that they understand what different roles entail. Sometimes managers don't even know about that document, and discover its existence because someone asks about it, who in turn was told by a mentor who happened to know about it.
- lliamander 7y ago
  I've worked at those kinds of organizations, read the documents, put in the work, and got promoted...by switching companies :). In my experience, the companies that do have those documents (and not all do) don't actually really use them or make much reference to them in 1-on-1's or reviews. That's because management's perspective is that they are interested in how well you are doing at the job they hired you for, not how you are doing in the job you want. In the few cases where I've seen people promoted within a company (which pales in comparison to how often people get promoted by switching companies) It was always because management felt that there was a new role that needed filling. Certainly some of the time those people earned those promotions (though not all the time) but the actual driving factor here was (perceived) business need.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - darkerside 7y ago
    In my experience, I've seen plenty of promotions from within (and experienced my fair share as well). They just take a while to happen. But then, I've been at multiple companies for over 5 years. That's probably about how long it takes to watch someone grow from an individual contributor into a leader, including leadership skills as well as building reputational and political capital across the organization. Patience is a virtue.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      > Patience is a virtue. Your anecdata doesn't align with actual studies that indicate frequent job changes as the optimal strategy for maximising income. Your loyalty isn't worth anything to your employer in the current market. Those times ended several decades ago. Here's some counter anecdata: after graduating, I doubled my salary and seniority twice in 3 years with two job hops. If I stayed at my first employer, I'd be lucky to be making a third of what I am now and none of the career prospects that have become available. I'm in my mid 30s and have a seniority level that lifers at my current employer hope to achieve sometime in their mid 40s if ever.
- cozos 7y ago
  Would you rather have your organization be filled with engineers that output high quality work or so-called Staff Engineer influencers? Personally I would rather most to be the former. Doers are important (probably the most important) and should be rewarded, IMO. Hard work and no promotion leads to quitting. Getting promoted to Staff etc is more about being put on important projects, building relationships with managers from other teams (i.e. reminding them you exist come Promo committee), and tooting your own horn a lot. IMO, this is not necessarily related to how good you are and perhaps not as valuable to the organization as much as we think. Personally, I've gotten promoted (or recently, not laid off) basically because my team was selected to work on the fancy new project. Probably some other guy in a different team didn't get a promotion because he was just on the wrong project.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    Organizations that are filled purely with "doers" who don't make their coworkers better provide a great perpetual need for people to come in and clean up the mess later at often higher pay. :p But maybe there's more than just "sloppy isolated doers" and "no-code-writing influencer staff timewasters"... A doer who does help everyone around them keep the codebase clean too... well... yep, that's the influencer part. So yeah, definitely want that.
    - UK-Al05 7y ago
      Pairing code, code review, Friday learning seasons where everyone pitches are often far better than organisational concept of mentors.
    - spugody 7y ago
      In my experience, there are few of those type of valuable influencers around and they have a limited career path. Maybe a promotion or two above standard engineer, but that is it. Those that rise higher to the very senior positions are are able to promote their image, regardless of how much value that actually provide, and in fact they often provide negative value. That is in IT structures. Our primary mechanism for promotion at Big Corp is "influence". But influence is measured in a completely stupid manner by people who have been promoted to senior positions via the same completely stupid process. People who come up with a "risk reduction" methodology and manage to sell it to someone senior, that requires all engineers to start adhering to this new methodology, which provides very little risk reduction but negatively impacts a huge amount of productivity, is very likely to get promoted. For example, one person may have inadvertently done something stupid on a production host such as running CPU intensive operations on huge log files. So instead of looking at the correct fix, which would be to immediately form a small, very capable team of engineers tasked with going across the firm and helping teams get log files streamed off correctly, so engineers have very little need to go onto prod hosts, nope, some person with "influence", will decide with no consultation and no notice that all engineer access to prod hosts is gone. So now to support our applications we have to ask a support team to transfer large files around our network in an ad-hoc manner just so we can perform the analysis we need. Not only is this not much risk reduction, it completely hinders engineers ability to do a good job, which negatively impacts the company. Yet this person if he isn't already senior, will be able to in the yearly review hugely sell his "risk reduction" exercise and will almost certainly be seen by the other idiots as someone equally capable as themselves and worthy of a similar position.
- alexbanks 7y ago
  > And yet every single review cycle there's always a portion of engineers who think they deserve a promotion because their personal work was high quality. It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. It's amazing. I have found in my career that most engineers don't read anything. Emails, HR docs, AC, nothin. The first to get mad and the last to think that they could adjust their behavior. (I am an engineer).
Spooky23 7y ago
You have to work hard at the right work. Many people make the mistake of working like a donkey, or burrowing themselves as essential parts of some process.
justicezyx 7y ago
Nah, the idea that "one that's mentoring those around them to do their job well" can lead to promotion is also just an example out of many. My experience is that the biggest promotion driver is always the product success. And the product success also vary between organizations. I've seen a huge project promoted people in the process, but in the end was entirely canceled and delivered minimal value, while the promoted folks wisely left the team. While in other places, if the product ends not getting their customers happy, execution excellence is not rewarded much. If product success is not easy to get, the team can be very excellent, but wont have much growth space in seniority. That has nothing to do with their personal skills etc.
7thaccount 7y ago
I think hardwork generally does lead to promotion up to a certain point. My company will allow you to go from a 1 to a 2 on good contributions alone and time. Going from 2 to Senior takes additional time, but is more than just technical. It's about how well you can train other members of the team, work on special projects of difficulty, work without direct guidance, give regular feedback to management, work across department barriers, deal with customers...etc. It also helps if you're persistent.
irrational 7y ago
I don't understand why people want to be promoted. I've worked for the same company for nearly 2 decades. I'm basically doing the same job as when I started. I don't want more work or more responsibilities. I'm happy staying in my groove. In that time my pay has more than doubled. Recently my boss informed me that they were giving me a 15% raise. I didn't ask for a raise. I don't have to do any more work. Frankly I've felt for awhile that they are paying me way more than I deserve and I was astonished that they wanted to give me 15% more out of the blue. Maybe I lucked into an unusual situation, but I work for a huge Fortune 150 company and my situation seems fairly typical here.
- technicaldonut 7y ago
  From my experience that is indeed a somewhat unusual situation. The companies I have worked for in the past and those where friends and family work tend give "raises" to match inflation and sometimes a bit on top. There are also plenty of companies that dont raise your salary at all unless you get promoted. I think that is part of why many people advise new graduates to change jobs every 2-3 years for some time as often the salary of the newly hired tends to reflect the current market rate. I have had instances where newly hired people with less experience than colleagues received 20% more salary simply because they were new. This is for the same job and productivity level. Your standpoint on promotions is perfectly fine and even healthy. Not all people want to get promoted and as long as your are comfortable in your job and like, or at least not mind, doing it, thats okay. Your boss and the company you work for may very well genuinely care about you. They may have also raised your salary because your are extremely knowledgeable in your area and cant afford to have you leave the company. They could also very much underpay your current market rate and raised your salary to match what other people are earning in that position. No one except your boss can answer that. Leaving a company that you like working at is a risk and can backfire. I did it once and regretted my decision. Other times it can be a great decision and expose you to new things that you may end up liking even more than your current job. At the end of the day that decision is squarely on you.
- sibeliuss 7y ago
  I feel the exact same way. When I have 1:1s with my manager the topic of career progression often comes up and I kinda feel bad saying I'm perfectly happy as a sr engineer who is dependable and does good work.
KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
I think it's time that our industry retired the notion of the 10x engineer the same way we don't use the terms "rock star" and "ninja" anymore.
- lliamander 7y ago
  Variability of productivity between engineers is a real thing. Even when I've been on teams where everyone is fairly competent and senior, I've seen folks who really stand out.

Traster 7y ago

I'll tell you what amazes me: If you look at any reasonably large engineering organisation they will likely have guidance published from HR stating what the criteria are for different job roles, and they'll actually be pretty similar across different organisations. You might be a Senior Software Engineer at one place but called a Staff engineer at another place, but they're broadly comparable, and the seniority criteria show a very clear progression: the more senior you get the more influence you are showing across the organisation, whether that means managing larger projects, mentoring other staff, consulting with other teams on best known practices, or influencing other parts of the company inter-discplinary projects. Almost every large organisation will have a neat table telling you exactly what attributes you need to show. They all show that progression - more influence on the organisation as a whole. And yet every single review cycle there's always a portion of engineers who think they deserve a promotion because their personal work was high quality. It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. It's amazing.

bluGill 7y ago
What is more amazing is their managers who have figured out how to work the system are not telling people that. Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go so if they can't get there tell them why. I've wasted years working hard and trying to gain influence only to realize that the areas I was getting influence in didn't matter to anyone so I was condemned to get good jobs but no promotion. It has been hard to let go and find a path with real influence. Where I was going is one of those areas that only seen if not done. Lesson learned though : the guy who created the bad design requiring them to come in right before release and work a weekend is rewarded above the guy who wrote good code that works...
- mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
  > Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go This sounds nice, and from the perspective of the direct report, sure, this is the mindset that you want your managers to have. That said, your manager isn't necessarily incentivized by the company to optimize for this. What's best for the employee isn't necessarily what's best for the company.
  - alexandercrohde 7y ago
    Which is why employees are disincentivized from trusting those managers.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  I tell my developers this repeatedly, in the form of "making yourself 10% better is not as good as making everyone you work with 1% better". A few get it and shift towards a "rising tide floats all boats" mentality, the rest do nothing and are perfectly adequate, or agree with me then turn back to solely focusing on self-improvement. The kicker? That 1% universal imporvement is soooo much easier than 10% or even 5% personal improvement. You can help your team become more effective just by (1) commiting to the act of (2) giving a sh!t.
  - bojo 7y ago
alexandercrohde 7y ago
Meh, it's been my experience that those charts are borderline worthless. The truth is promotions are probably only fractionally about performance. A lot of it is budget, creating pr/"buzz" [even if it's proportional to impact], did you happen to be on a revenue-generating team, is there any political risk to promoting you (e.g. would you say the type of things I'm saying right now?). Maybe google or something is different (and I doubt it), but that's less than 1% of engineers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tibiahurried 7y ago
  what makes the difference is: - your boss is influential (politics) - you are lucky enough to work on a high impact/ high visibility project - you play yes man with your boss and please them - how long have you been with the company and the political connections you have made ... quality plays a very small role in promotions ... In all the organizations I have worked for, I expected a promotion within the first 2 years (to then leave on the 3rd anyway :) ). When that did not happen, I simply left and got a salary increase and +1 level anyway. If you are lucky enough to work in a high demand field (like tech) and you are good at it ... you are pretty much in control. Qualified people that get s*t done are always in high demand, just make sure to always be on the top and keep sharpening your skills ;)
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    > you play yes man with your boss and please them You need to be able to read this one. I've gotten a lot of props for being someone by bosses can rely on to challenge them. But I also don't do it for stupid things, and if they seem to not be willing to flinch then I back down.
JoshTriplett 7y ago
> It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. Amazingly, some organizations do not hand every new hire that document on day 1, so that they understand what different roles entail. Sometimes managers don't even know about that document, and discover its existence because someone asks about it, who in turn was told by a mentor who happened to know about it.
lliamander 7y ago
I've worked at those kinds of organizations, read the documents, put in the work, and got promoted...by switching companies :). In my experience, the companies that do have those documents (and not all do) don't actually really use them or make much reference to them in 1-on-1's or reviews. That's because management's perspective is that they are interested in how well you are doing at the job they hired you for, not how you are doing in the job you want. In the few cases where I've seen people promoted within a company (which pales in comparison to how often people get promoted by switching companies) It was always because management felt that there was a new role that needed filling. Certainly some of the time those people earned those promotions (though not all the time) but the actual driving factor here was (perceived) business need.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- darkerside 7y ago
  In my experience, I've seen plenty of promotions from within (and experienced my fair share as well). They just take a while to happen. But then, I've been at multiple companies for over 5 years. That's probably about how long it takes to watch someone grow from an individual contributor into a leader, including leadership skills as well as building reputational and political capital across the organization. Patience is a virtue.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    > Patience is a virtue. Your anecdata doesn't align with actual studies that indicate frequent job changes as the optimal strategy for maximising income. Your loyalty isn't worth anything to your employer in the current market. Those times ended several decades ago. Here's some counter anecdata: after graduating, I doubled my salary and seniority twice in 3 years with two job hops. If I stayed at my first employer, I'd be lucky to be making a third of what I am now and none of the career prospects that have become available. I'm in my mid 30s and have a seniority level that lifers at my current employer hope to achieve sometime in their mid 40s if ever.
cozos 7y ago
Would you rather have your organization be filled with engineers that output high quality work or so-called Staff Engineer influencers? Personally I would rather most to be the former. Doers are important (probably the most important) and should be rewarded, IMO. Hard work and no promotion leads to quitting. Getting promoted to Staff etc is more about being put on important projects, building relationships with managers from other teams (i.e. reminding them you exist come Promo committee), and tooting your own horn a lot. IMO, this is not necessarily related to how good you are and perhaps not as valuable to the organization as much as we think. Personally, I've gotten promoted (or recently, not laid off) basically because my team was selected to work on the fancy new project. Probably some other guy in a different team didn't get a promotion because he was just on the wrong project.
- majormajor 7y ago
  Organizations that are filled purely with "doers" who don't make their coworkers better provide a great perpetual need for people to come in and clean up the mess later at often higher pay. :p But maybe there's more than just "sloppy isolated doers" and "no-code-writing influencer staff timewasters"... A doer who does help everyone around them keep the codebase clean too... well... yep, that's the influencer part. So yeah, definitely want that.
  - UK-Al05 7y ago
    Pairing code, code review, Friday learning seasons where everyone pitches are often far better than organisational concept of mentors.
  - spugody 7y ago
    In my experience, there are few of those type of valuable influencers around and they have a limited career path. Maybe a promotion or two above standard engineer, but that is it. Those that rise higher to the very senior positions are are able to promote their image, regardless of how much value that actually provide, and in fact they often provide negative value. That is in IT structures. Our primary mechanism for promotion at Big Corp is "influence". But influence is measured in a completely stupid manner by people who have been promoted to senior positions via the same completely stupid process. People who come up with a "risk reduction" methodology and manage to sell it to someone senior, that requires all engineers to start adhering to this new methodology, which provides very little risk reduction but negatively impacts a huge amount of productivity, is very likely to get promoted. For example, one person may have inadvertently done something stupid on a production host such as running CPU intensive operations on huge log files. So instead of looking at the correct fix, which would be to immediately form a small, very capable team of engineers tasked with going across the firm and helping teams get log files streamed off correctly, so engineers have very little need to go onto prod hosts, nope, some person with "influence", will decide with no consultation and no notice that all engineer access to prod hosts is gone. So now to support our applications we have to ask a support team to transfer large files around our network in an ad-hoc manner just so we can perform the analysis we need. Not only is this not much risk reduction, it completely hinders engineers ability to do a good job, which negatively impacts the company. Yet this person if he isn't already senior, will be able to in the yearly review hugely sell his "risk reduction" exercise and will almost certainly be seen by the other idiots as someone equally capable as themselves and worthy of a similar position.
alexbanks 7y ago
> And yet every single review cycle there's always a portion of engineers who think they deserve a promotion because their personal work was high quality. It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. It's amazing. I have found in my career that most engineers don't read anything. Emails, HR docs, AC, nothin. The first to get mad and the last to think that they could adjust their behavior. (I am an engineer).

Spooky23 7y ago

You have to work hard at the right work. Many people make the mistake of working like a donkey, or burrowing themselves as essential parts of some process.

justicezyx 7y ago

Nah, the idea that "one that's mentoring those around them to do their job well" can lead to promotion is also just an example out of many. My experience is that the biggest promotion driver is always the product success. And the product success also vary between organizations. I've seen a huge project promoted people in the process, but in the end was entirely canceled and delivered minimal value, while the promoted folks wisely left the team. While in other places, if the product ends not getting their customers happy, execution excellence is not rewarded much. If product success is not easy to get, the team can be very excellent, but wont have much growth space in seniority. That has nothing to do with their personal skills etc.

7thaccount 7y ago

I think hardwork generally does lead to promotion up to a certain point. My company will allow you to go from a 1 to a 2 on good contributions alone and time. Going from 2 to Senior takes additional time, but is more than just technical. It's about how well you can train other members of the team, work on special projects of difficulty, work without direct guidance, give regular feedback to management, work across department barriers, deal with customers...etc. It also helps if you're persistent.

irrational 7y ago

I don't understand why people want to be promoted. I've worked for the same company for nearly 2 decades. I'm basically doing the same job as when I started. I don't want more work or more responsibilities. I'm happy staying in my groove. In that time my pay has more than doubled. Recently my boss informed me that they were giving me a 15% raise. I didn't ask for a raise. I don't have to do any more work. Frankly I've felt for awhile that they are paying me way more than I deserve and I was astonished that they wanted to give me 15% more out of the blue. Maybe I lucked into an unusual situation, but I work for a huge Fortune 150 company and my situation seems fairly typical here.

technicaldonut 7y ago
From my experience that is indeed a somewhat unusual situation. The companies I have worked for in the past and those where friends and family work tend give "raises" to match inflation and sometimes a bit on top. There are also plenty of companies that dont raise your salary at all unless you get promoted. I think that is part of why many people advise new graduates to change jobs every 2-3 years for some time as often the salary of the newly hired tends to reflect the current market rate. I have had instances where newly hired people with less experience than colleagues received 20% more salary simply because they were new. This is for the same job and productivity level. Your standpoint on promotions is perfectly fine and even healthy. Not all people want to get promoted and as long as your are comfortable in your job and like, or at least not mind, doing it, thats okay. Your boss and the company you work for may very well genuinely care about you. They may have also raised your salary because your are extremely knowledgeable in your area and cant afford to have you leave the company. They could also very much underpay your current market rate and raised your salary to match what other people are earning in that position. No one except your boss can answer that. Leaving a company that you like working at is a risk and can backfire. I did it once and regretted my decision. Other times it can be a great decision and expose you to new things that you may end up liking even more than your current job. At the end of the day that decision is squarely on you.
sibeliuss 7y ago
I feel the exact same way. When I have 1:1s with my manager the topic of career progression often comes up and I kinda feel bad saying I'm perfectly happy as a sr engineer who is dependable and does good work.

KKKKkkkk1 7y ago

I think it's time that our industry retired the notion of the 10x engineer the same way we don't use the terms "rock star" and "ninja" anymore.

lliamander 7y ago
Variability of productivity between engineers is a real thing. Even when I've been on teams where everyone is fairly competent and senior, I've seen folks who really stand out.