Career advancements in large companies can be rather arbitrary. Some of the worst programmers I've ever worked with were "Senior" or "Staff" level. From my expe

Career advancements in large companies can be rather arbitrary. Some of the worst programmers I've ever worked with were "Senior" or "Staff" level. From my experiences, people get promoted in large companies for a few reasons: 1 - Politics. This is the most obvious one. People in power share power with people they like because it helps them maintain control. 2 - Tenure. Some companies just auto-promote people after a certain period of time. These periods of times can be very long if the company has an older "business" view of tenure and promotions. This doesn't seem to be the case at your company though, given your friends. 3 - Business knowledge over programming skills. I've seen quite a few terrible programmers get elevated to higher positions simply because they had good knowledge of the project. Any time they were in their text editor they were probably doing a disservice to the code, but the companies really valued their domain expertise.