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> Does this mean that only family members and friends of managers get promoted? Or that you have to bribe folks in the company to advance? What do you actually

> Does this mean that only family members and friends of managers get promoted? Or that you have to bribe folks in the company to advance? What do you actually mean? In many cases I've seen people being promoted due to being close friends with the managers while contributing little to nothing of value. Also dishonestly claiming credit for others work is a great way to advance. Donald trump types get promoted. > What I would say is that most companies haven't really put much thought into building career ladders for their people. These career ladder guidelines often make the problem worse. They allow poor engineers to get away with avoiding real work in favor of soft "cross-team impact". Often the lower level engineers working on the difficult technical problems are making the real contributions. Good engineers should be focused on solving the most difficult problems, whether cross-team or not. They should not be focused on gaming silly HR guidelines, people who take these guidelines seriously make the worst engineers. > Algorithms interviews only tell me that somebody can pass an algorithms interview -- one in which the solution space is very narrow, and there are a few correct answers. > In real-world engineering, this is very rarely the case. I don't agree. Psychometrics shows general cognitive ability is very important, and algorithms interviews to an extent seem like a decent test of it. Coming up with difficult solutions isn't happening without proper grasp of the basics and strong general cognitive ability.

sanderjd 6y ago
From reading this comment, I think it is possible that you undervalue non-coding work. That is, I think it seems like you don't see as much value in it as some companies you've worked for do. There isn't really an objective measure to say whether you're more right or whether those companies are, but it's definitely the case that career trajectories are driven by what companies value rather than what lower level engineers value. But take my thoughts in this with a grain of salt: my bias is toward believing that most engineers place way too much value on coding work and not nearly enough on the (in my opinion) harder work of figuring out how to successfully execute an ambiguously defined project.

sanderjd 6y ago

From reading this comment, I think it is possible that you undervalue non-coding work. That is, I think it seems like you don't see as much value in it as some companies you've worked for do. There isn't really an objective measure to say whether you're more right or whether those companies are, but it's definitely the case that career trajectories are driven by what companies value rather than what lower level engineers value. But take my thoughts in this with a grain of salt: my bias is toward believing that most engineers place way too much value on coding work and not nearly enough on the (in my opinion) harder work of figuring out how to successfully execute an ambiguously defined project.