In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).

With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:

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.

2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).

3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.

4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.

5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.

Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money. At that point your only option is to move on, because if you stop performing at the "expected" level due to lack of reciprocation, suddenly you have "performance issues".

While this is true... it's also letting yourself be massively taken advantage of, and underpaid.

Yes, the best way to get promoted is to do work above your level. The problem is, you're not getting paid what you deserve for that. If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.

Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the process.

Managers certainly want to take advantage of you by getting you to overperform without being overpaid. But employees should do everything they can not to fall for it. Which usually requires getting companies to compete over you.

This post has some big gaps. Who is this for? When is it relevant?

The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.

Excerpting:

> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.

If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job

So the rules of promotions:

1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable

2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")

3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)

^ https://www.noidea.dog/glue

My advice is a little different. It’s make the life of your boss insanely easy. Similar in nature to post but slightly different optimization function. Don’t over communicate, communicate just the right amount. Anticipate questions. Don’t create any friction for them and be really helpful. Some of my people will anticipate things and be proactive. I love that and I constantly push to get them promoted.

I am a longtime lurker. I signed up to say this: Never work extra without being paid extra. You can easily work your butt off and never get anything.

Sure, the boss and the company would like you to work extra, but when did the company ever pay you extra up front for work you—perhaps—would deliver at a later time?

You are a business. It’s not sound business to lower your own hourly rate.

Sure, if everything looks 100 percent aligned, buy the pretty girl a drink, but most of the time things are not aligned.

Don’t be the prostitute who expects to get paid later.

Oh man, this is bad advice. So, maybe one manager said it... but having been a CTO/dev manager, I will say that having to deal with people trying to do a job that isn't their job is a royal pain in the ass. I have had to deal with this several times, both as someone on the sidelines and as the manager responsible.

When I was a CTO it ultimately required the talk: "It's MY job to manage dev resources and figure out what levers we push where with our limited money. When you try to do a different job then you got hired for, you screw that all up and set me and the company up for failure. If you don't want to do your job, you need to look for another one"

It definitely didn't make me want to promote those people.

A much better approach is to talk to your manager and skip manager about what great career development looks like to them. And if there is no path and that's what you're after, leave. (Lots of good jobs out there that just don't have this path for perfectly good business reasons, or the funnell is too full.)

While this may work, it just seems like incredibly unhealthy advice to give or to take. People should be able to focus on their work without being expected to take up random side quests, and if there is a career path, make the requirements clear.

The best promotion advice I have is to pick a great manager who is genuinely motivated to help you advance in your career. You won't get promoted easily by a manager who's checked out or likes counting beans.

Managers like that are few and far between. If you find one, make it clear to them you want to follow them because they'll get snatched from you in no time and be themselves promoted far far away.

How to find said manager? Ask around, do a little org chart recon in Outlook and do some networking. Where is the drama kept to a minimum in the org? What teams seem to be succeeding both internally and across to other teams. Are there teams where the techies are outspoken (positively) within the org and making a name for themselves in the org? Get to know the managers for those teams.

You may have heard people quit when their manager is a tyrant, this is very true! But there is a middling type of manager, not a horrible person, but also one that isn't helping you along either. Maybe plot and scheme on how to gracefully move to other teams you could better contribute to.

This advice only works at the team level. Beyond that, it’s borderline fantasy. At senior and leadership levels, promotions aren’t rewards for effort, they’re forward looking bets made by people above you, and those people have incentives, blind spots, and egos. Reporting to an insecure director or a clueless manager will quickly disabuse you of the “just do great work” myth.

Also, if the company isn’t growing, none of this matters. You can operate like a CTO all you want and all that happens is more work gets dumped on you for the same pay. Take on stretch work if you’re hungry for it and it’s explicitly acknowledged as next-level responsibility. Otherwise, you’re just volunteering to be exploited.

> Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap.

That's not what I learned from work. I saw people with skill way beyond their position hang around companies getting jack shit before they eventually got bored and left, and then other people getting thrust into seniority for arbitrary reasons:

> Oh, you got hired just three weeks ago? Well the rest of the team has just quit, so I guess you're in charge now.

> Corporate are trying to fix the gender imbalance in the c-suite, you're a woman, you want to be an executive?

Both of those people _were_ very good at what they did, but so were the other people who didn't get those arbitrary events.

My personal experience with this from the manager's perspective: I aim to promote someone as soon as they are ready, but no sooner. If I promote someone who will not succeed against the expectations of the higher leveled title, I'm just setting them up to get fired or "managed out" when they were otherwise perfectly competent in the level they're at. That's ignoring the natural fuzziness and storytelling element of defining and measuring competence, of course, but that's the general idea of where I put the threshold.

"Readiness" means that I believe that after their promotion they will be able to execute at the higher level at least most of the time. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be already doing the higher leveled job, but in practice they do need to show that they can sustain some approximation of it.

I think that works well for smaller orgs, but in larger organizations (especially where department headcount growth is not expected) it might be more complicated and more meta/political. I wish that were not the case, but in reality, trying to "do the job" of your manager can backfire.

My experience at several large companies I worked for, the promotion comes because the activities are already at the new, higher level. i.e., working at SVP/level 7 when officially at VP/level 6 for a period when the promotion is offered.

Good or bad, this is how the industry I work in promotes.

I think the best approach is to take on extra, above position responsibilities, accountabilities after discussion with superior, after agreeing in writing that this is part of a path to promotion.

> What he meant was simpler and more powerful: start doing the job before you have the title. Take on more responsibility before you're officially given it.

protip: this won't get you promoted, won't get you any accolades within the company, and will more like get you on a Performance Improvement Plan

if you want to get promoted, get a offer at another company and take that offer

if you want a fat bonus, if your company has a formal bonus structure, do other's people's work for them while potentially neglecting your own

> Do it for six months, not six days.

Six months of unpaid stress for doing your managers job for a glimpse (not given!) promotion. You're a great manager, worked with a guy like you – never again.

If you read this and you're at the start of your journey, then heed my warning: nothing good comes out of this ever.

If a person is profitable to have around, than the conversation is simple:

1. Company has money people may want

2. People have unique skills a company needs to profit

3. Everything else is 100% unrelated BS

On average, every software developer brings in >$1.3m USD/year in additional revenue. If you are being exploited, than just find a better gig someplace better... as it is usually easier than advancing out of a critical role.

Salaries with legal encumbrances are usually just a terrible deal in the long-term. =3

This sounds like surface level wisdom if you are in your earlier career. I see several problems with this advice, but here is the most obvious one: this only works if you want to become a manager.

It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.

Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).

Good advice. Doesn't work in bad culture.

I once was told "we cannot promote you because the work you've done checks the boxes for 2 rolls above you and does not check the boxes for your next roll"

If your boss tells you explicitly that this is ok, then go ahead. And also if they don't tell you this, it might be ok too. But there's scenarios were you are being paid to do a very specific job, and trying to get promoted is a form of escapism for many and it can be an organizational problem.

In argentina we have a saying "Too much chief for too few indians"(as in indigenous people), everyone wants to be the boss, no one wants to do the dishes.

I've been a victim of this, and it especially was a problem when my actual role responsibilities suffered, but even if I managed to fulfill my responsibilities perfectly, it caused friction and a command chain confusion. (especially when other people tried to compete for a promotion as well)

IME, taking on extra responsibility doesn't get you promoted. However, you can take it on and then find a new job with a better salary where the responsibility you added is part of the expectation.

The blog is not terrible advice, but "getting promoted" just seems like a waste of time and effort nowadays. To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.

To get hired away from Google to an L6-equivalent role at Meta (or whereever) you need to get halfway through one L6 project and do a few hours of interviewing. There's no comparison in the level of effort. (And I'm not picking on Google here. I think it's the same or worse nearly everywhere.)

I don't agree with this advice at all. Do the work you're paid to do - no more, and no less. In my experience, working extra doesn't actually get you more respect from an employer. Often times, it's the opposite.

Back when I was working as salaried employee, I never asked for a promotion or a raise. Not once. But I got them! Meanwhile, I watched coworkers spend years fighting for promotions, taking on so much more work than I would ever agree to, and were repeatedly denied. Eventually, they would give up and get a job elsewhere. Some did manage to get promoted, but it was grueling.

These coworkers weren't less skilled than I was. I would say many of them were actually more capable, despite my position being ranked higher.

A lot of comments here are talking about "healthy" work cultures and whatnot. I worked for medium-sized tech companies that you've heard of with great engineering cultures and a healthy approach to work-life balance. I don't believe that "healthy" results in getting recognized for going above and beyond.

Others are mentioning office politics. I did not befriend coworkers, did not make enemies, etc. I simply did my work.

I'm sure many of you have had the experience that if you make a mistake—not necessarily at work, but just in general—and then apologize profusely, you will be treated worse than if you were more casual or didn't even apologize at all. I find that making yourself "smaller" will often result in people taking advantage of you. Similarly, it seems to me that working super hard will simply raise people's baseline expectations of you, and they will exploit that. This isn't necessarily a conscious thing on behalf of your boss(es), but it's absolutely something that happens.

Given all of that, my advice is to simply do your job. Over time, you will gain more experience, and that experience will potentially turn into promotions naturally. If not, then get a new job. Note however, that I'm not a proponent of frequent job hopping (I never spent less than three years at a company).

If you're not self-employed, then your work is making someone else rich. No need to make them even richer if you're not getting compensated for it.

Just do your job. Don't stress out trying to do your boss's job. Your department is likely to be off shored or made redundant in a merger anyway.

With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.

There are a lot of factors that go into achieving success in the workplace. There are usually competing ideas of what success is to you, versus what it is to the one rating you or paying you. You have to, at some level, appear to be good at something they think is good to have around. Sometimes that aligns with what you think is good, sometimes it doesn’t.

Of course the advice in OP is going to be relative, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to have a good sense of what your immediate does, how they think, what metrics they value, etc. If not for your own advancement- keeping immediate leadership off tilt can greatly increase QOL, or vice-versa. I personally would love to have leadership above me that I think "damn, I'd like to be a little more like that guy" but in almost 20 years of being in the workforce, including military and the likes, that kind of leadership has been hard to come by.

This is just recycled advice that's been given for 30+ years. "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" etc. The thing is this only really "works" in healthy or semi-healthy environments. You could just as easily have an infantile, poorly qualified, easily threatened middle manager above you that will perceive this kind of behavior as an attack and take the legs out from under you in ways that you have very little control over (has happened to me)

this is recommending an employee work outside their scope in the hopes of getting promoted. it really depends on the company culture and if internal promotions are common otherwise it's just you doing your manager's work, and i don't see why anyone should be taking on more responsbilities without getting paid for it.

For me the "responsibility first" part is the most important. I care more that you are willing to take responsibility at a higher level than your absolute performance at what you do. Because if you take responsibility you might make mistakes but you will fix them. But if you make mistakes and don't fix them, then giving you more autonomy is a liability. Fixing mistakes often involves demonstrating many aspects of operating at a higher level as well - you take the lead on communicating with other teams about the mistake, addressing the impact, apologising for any harm caused.

For me, taking responsibility is one of those necessary (but not sufficient) things I have to see before I will consider a promotion (at least, a genuine one where someone actually operates at a higher level with more autonomy).

> "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."

When I was a junior, mid, and starting senior level developer, I was so focused on getting ahead, and I would’ve listened intently to this.

The reality is though that most managers and principal or higher devs are great with you taking on responsibility if you’re ready for it, and making mistakes and learning is often fine, but when you stop respecting those with more experience and start working around them, they’re not going to be happy.

My advice: take on responsibilities and do the work, but always respect others. You will never regret giving someone enough respect. If you have a heart or a brain, you will almost certainly regret not treating someone with respect; it will haunt you, even if you one day apologize to them.

Yeah this would get an immediate “stay in your lane” warning where I work

This works well if your company culture doesn’t abhor an IC or manager trying to push for improvements in places that are not their responsibility.

Unfortunately there are a lot of places that do dislike this - and it may result in you getting fired instead of promoted :)

I don't want to take my boss's place, though. I don't want to manage people, I want to address problems on a broader scope than I'm currently in a position to do.

This is one of the best pieces of career advice one can give, and I’ve had my fair share of experience that this works very well.

Most people wait to be promoted to the title/designation to do the work of that role. However, if you want to avoid friction when asked, “Why should I promote you to this role?”, you should already be doing the job and proving you can do it.

I once saw a QA tester tinkering with the front-end code, fixing the bugs himself, then went to the engineer and pointed out where to fix. When asked if he wanted to become a front-end engineer, I realized he was waiting for an opportunity to be promoted. So, I repeated my usual advice: if you want to be promoted, be already doing that role. He started learning, and work on front-end work besides his QA work. When he asked to be promoted, it was just a title change and a pay raise. He went on to lead the Product Design Team at a major oil company (at a branch in Bangalore, India). A Good photographer, and always has an eye for design.

Similar story of an engineer waiting to be promoted to a Lead Architect. Advised him to start doing it way before talking about his promotion. I don't remember his promotion in the team I was working but heard back that he was easily gotten to that position and a big salary jump at a new company (a new city). I once saw him working in the plane we were flying together, while I was sleeping. I think he deployed when we landed.

In touch with both, and lot others. None that I had advised on doing the role above them have regretted.

This is how I eventually ended up being CTO and eventually CEO. I wanted the overall business to succeed.

I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.

This is only good advice if your company has high profit margins or funding and an expectation of growth, or your manager is extremely kind and trusting, or there are signs your manager is about to be fired/reorged and consultants or higher ups are asking if you want to replace them. More established industries or stagnating companies with low profit margin and no VC backing do not have a lot of room at the top, there are "negative selection" processes for management, and trying to do your boss's job is likely to be seen as insubordination. In those organizations the managers keep their job not by excelling at it (typically they would have leveled out due to the Peter principle) but by actively culling threats, and have all kinds of dirty tricks they can use to get rid of you if you show too much initiative.

Make clear what your goals are to your manager, brainstorm with your manager what kind of specific work would lead them to recommend you for promotion. Then propose that specific work, get them to agree, deliver the work, and hold them to their agreement. Ideally talk to other stakeholders/skip-levels since promotions are usually by committee and you want as many allies as you can in the room.

You also want to figure out if it even makes sense to go for a promotion, if the organization isn't growing - it's going to be a lot harder/impossible to make it.

It also may not be financially worth it if you care about work-life-balance. It might be worth it to get paid 50-70% as much but not have to spend your day in back to back meetings. It may even pencil the same if you consider hourly rates and taxes.

The best promotion advice I ever received is that you can’t be promoted, if you can’t be replaced.

I’ve participated and appealed to promotions committees at a few big tech companies and the principle for achieving the promotion is sustained performance for a half or 2 at the next level, judged by a number of dimensions. A couple drivers are revenue impact, business direction, or how well you are enabling others to succeed.

If the staff is large enough, calibrations are done to find template team members at the higher level, to make it very clear that the candidates performance is meeting that higher bar.

I think most ICs think “I’ve been working hard, I deserve a promotion”. A better barometer is whether your peers assume you are already at that higher level without knowing your rank.

Smells like LLM written. Maybe useful advice though. Who actually writes the hyphen in compound modifiers (or even knows what that is)? E.g. "team-level" instead of "team level".

> I couldn't have been happier.

And phrases like this.

It's like this: if you want to become a certain kind of person, start now. If you want to be a writer, start writing now. This doesn't just apply to career advancement; it almost applies to everything.

Good advice, in general. But there is a risk here, which is that you're encouraging people to do something which isn't their job.

Are you sure you don't want this person working on the things they are supposed to be working on?

Further, even if it all goes well, you're encouraging someone to do a more stressful job and not (yet) compensating them. Given the fact that you can't practically promote everyone you want, this risks your senior-with-junior-title feeling taken advantage of and prone to look for their title elsewhere.

This is nonsense to get you to work more for the same pay.

Its good to do this to get an idea of what it means to work on a higher level but it WILL NOT get you promoted.

Promotion is about leverage. What can you supply that no one else can and thats crucial for your bosses-boss's success?

Stop thinking execution - its exactly the opposite of that.

Can you recruit people from other organizations, can you create a new product, work with every part fo the comapny, evangelize the company externally, attract capital ...

On a tangential note, I have a concern with all such advices from a technology standpoint. These are all ways to understand the rules and constraints for upward mobility and make them work for you. More and more people are bubbling up in technology roles and roles impacting the long term outcome for technology by using the ~smart/outcome driven/cheat sheet. Building thoughtful systems require long term vision and commitments, not sure if any of this fits in that picture though. Lately everything is just A MVP.

My early boss had a different approach. If you want a promotion, you need to have people in place who can do your job. That was touchy. If I had people capable of doing my job, what would happen when we do layoffs (which happened regularly)? But it was also through a period of strong growth, so the boss needed proven people in place to take on new opportunities. Working for a firm during its strong growth phase is very different from trying to climb a 10,000-deep corporate ladder.

I saw such a team of 3 people, who earns $500,000 in month.

Advice: solve business bottlenecks.

Their approach: - research the biggest problem in a company with as less communication as possible - prepare a full, easy plan well designed. They used slides and a designer. - split the plan on parts and first part is already with a nice designed demo. Make sure a founder/boss’s work is only pay and say yes. Zero headache. - make a meeting and pitch it, so a founder/boss can’t say no

Works for great company with amazing culture.

But what about insecure managers, jealousy managers, and managers who reward folks who are loyal to them or based on same region/country?

If you want to get promoted, you need a succession plan. You need to train up the person who will be the new you. If you're important enough to be promoted, you're too important to replace, so you'll be stuck where you are until you have a successor in place. By doing this you automatically demonstrate leadership.

Good advise. And old one too. In India it's summed up as - "Your job is to make your boss' job easier".

Maybe it’s just me, but is there anyone else who does NOT want to be promoted and is just happy to craft code day and night?

This matches my experience. I’ve hired more than 30 people, and only a handful really stayed and made an impact. The difference was never title or position, it was who actually took responsibility when things were unclear or hard. Roles can be assigned, but ownership can’t.

What horrible advice. Stop telling people to work harder without compensation. This isn't simply a matter of choice, it hurts the collective workforce. This isn't a charity, this is our livelihoods!

This stuff is so difficult because it's all situational. In my first job I got hired into a small team, within a year or so my boss quit. I essentially stepped into that job. But in order to be the manager of that team you needed ot be a certain level of seniority, so I was doing the job, but I couldn't have the title or the money. I talked to my manager and made clear that I wanted the job and asked how I get there. The answer was that I needed to be a grade 7 and I was only a (new) grade 5, and since there are only a handful of promotions they can give each year, all things being equal I would get promoted to the seniority level needed to be doing that job in about 6-10 years.

I was essentially doing what this article was advising, but because of the corporate structure I was in, I was just volunteering to be taken advantage of. The correct strategy actually was just to leave. I wasn't going to be successful in that structure, it wasn't a meritocracy and the business results over time went how you would expect. In the end I leverage a job offer to put myself on track to get into that role within 2 years, but in reality that was 2 years wasted, I should've left immediately.

This was always my secret to getting a job I’m not qualified for on paper.

At one point early in my career the old engineer left. I quickly stepped in “just until they hired somebody qualified”. Back then, a 4 year CS degree was required to get the job.

For reasons I can’t recall, we couldn’t hire someone for 6 months. My boss and I had a meeting with HR where he pleaded my case to get me hired. The HR director was actually yelling that I wasn’t qualified.

My boss calmly replied “He’s been doing it for the past 6 months. He’s actually been making improvements. Remember that process of yours that suddenly got a lot better? He did that.” I ended up getting hired right there. There was further drama about me being at my pay scale without a degree but my boss shielded me from much of it.

For that 6 months and for another 12 months after, I probably spent 18 hours a day working or learning to get up to speed. I was single and motivated so it worked out. Loved that boss.

That was many decades ago so I keep an eye out for that spark among my colleagues. I occasionally see it but for the most part, they are much more ambitious than I was and that warms my heart. (Two of them started companies you’ve heard of and cashed out)

Why do you work you’re not paid to do? The exact job of a manager is to handle the staff development. If you’re not doing that then what are you getting paid for?

Absolutely, but also you need to make sure you take on the strategical work of your manager and not the typical day 2 day stuff at operational/expected level, you need to do stuff above your waist line.

I liked the article and it’s right, but at the end of the day you also need to make sure your manager puts you up for promotion and that he is allowed by their management as well.

This is also documented in an old 1-page military paper called the "Doctrine of Completed Staff Work"

This is somewhat the oldest advice in the book: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have."

My best advice is to be likeable and just barely incompetent. You will get more money and less work.

Promotions are given to people who know other people and will not upset the order.

So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advice. But still this article presumes a lot.

In my experience, managers will naturally partition their reports into three buckets: their stars, their problems and their worker bees. The worker bees tend to be ignored. They're doing fine. They're getting on with whatever they've been told to do or possibly what they've found to do. They're not going to create any problems. The problems are the underperformers. These are people who create problems and/or are at risk of getting a subpar performance rating.

Now there are lots of reasons that someone can be a problem. I tend to believe that any problem just hasn't found the right fit yet and, until proven otherwise, problems are a failure in management. That tends to be a minority view in practice. It's more common to simply throw people in the deep end and sink or swim because that takes much less overhead. You will see this as teams who have a lot of churn but only in part of the team. In particularly toxic environments, savvy managers will game the system by having a sacrificial anode position. They hire someone to take the bad rating they have to give to protect the rest of the team.

And then there are the stars. These are the people you expect to grow and be promoted. More often than not however they are chosen rather than demonstrating their potential. I've seen someone shine when their director is actively trying to sabotage them but that's rare.

Your stars will get the better projects. Your problems will get the worse ones. If a given project is a success or not will largely come down to perception not reality.

The point I'm getting to is that despite all the process put around this at large companies like performance ratings, feedback, calibration, promo committees, etc the majority of all this is vibes based.

So back to the "take my job" advice. If someone is viewed as a star, that's great advice. For anyone else, you might get negative feedback about not doing your actual job, not being a team player and so on. I've seen it happen a million times.

And here's the dirty little secret of it all: this is where the racism, sexism and ableism sneaks in. It's usually not that direct but Stanford grads (as just one example) will tend to vibe with other Stanford grads. They have common experience, probably common professors and so on. Same for MIT. Or CMU. Or UW. Or Waterloo. And so on.

So all of the biases that go into the selection process for those institutions will bleed into the tech space.

And this kind of environment is much worse for anyone on the spectrum because allistic people will be inclined to dislike from the start for no reason and that's going to hurt how they're viewed (ie as a star, a worker bee or a problem) and their performance ratings.

Because all of this is ultimately just a popularity contest with very few exceptions. I've seen multiple people finagle their way to Senior STaff SWE on just vibes.

And all of this gets worse since the tech sector has joined Corporate America in being in permanet layoff mode. The Welchian "up or out" philosophy has taken hold in Big Tech where there are quotas of 5-10% of the workforce have to get subpar ratings every year and that tends to kill their careers at that company. This turns the entire workplace even more into an exercise in social engineering.

Ah, the classic "work even harder and do things you're not paid for with zero guarantee that someone will appreciate what you're doing while the company reaps the benefits". What a novel thought, I am so glad I clicked the article, especially since the author isn't even speaking from experience so he has nothing to back up his blogpost with.

Really good advice, and honestly wish I had known this at the start of my career. It makes a lot of sense, exactly because proactiveness is the secret sauce to a lot of successes in life.

Sorry but what year and working environment is this post from? Things have radically changed in the last 5 years.

But but

I don't want a promotion. I don't want a new role.

I want more money to keep doing what I already do.

This is peak office cuckoldry. Please mr sir, may I have more work and responsibility for the same pay! Please sir, I am hungry for more work and stress!

This site is so detached from reality sometimes its hard to even say anything.

It's hard for me to take advice like this seriously when, in my experience, things like budget and manager's social influence is more deciding in whether you get promoted or not than whatever work you did.

This advice has worked very well for me.

But but but, in some scenarios it has been at the expense of my well being. It’s not good to take on more work and not let go of some of the things you’re currently doing. Moreover, finding “permission” from your boss to let those things go can be challenging.

I’ve found this works best when you and your boss agree on the problem you’re stepping into (not necessarily your solution). It may be that you need to stick your neck out and suffer for awhile for them to see your perspective.

When you’re on the same page about what you’re solving, a good manager will clear room for you.

Standard promo advice tbh. Do the job and then ask for it. Except there's a brief moment when you are adding value not in proportion to your compensation which will be infuriating. Sometimes its also possible you end up stagnant where you keep performing at a higher level and never get the job. My advice is to always check your market value by talking to recruiters and/or HMs outside of your company. That way once you have the relevant bullets on your resume, either you get the promotion or you just leave. Hedge your bets.

Try to get your boss promoted!

This belongs to the "shit that never happened" list.

"Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap. You've got to show that you're capable of handling the responsibility for a sustained period of time."

Some classic management gaslighting. You have to work for a few years at the level of the higher position to get it. I will trust your work at this level, profit off of it, hold you responsible for it but not pay you appropriately for it. It's always the compensation piece that takes time.

I fear Maduro suggested this to Trump.

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some personal advice i recently learned is to show youre boss's boss if you really want to be promoted

ive been "trying to take my boss's position" for a few years and he really appreciates it. but during my last review my boss's boss pointed said he wasnt aware of any of this. i was leaving him off all my cc lists because i figured he didnt want the cluttered inbos. he said the opposite, he thought i wasnt following up and doing my job

all my effort was actually having a negative effect in the perspective of the decision maker. hopefully i knock his socks off this year since apparently the bars been lowered to the floor

These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.

Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?

TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:

    - I've been a developer in XX language for NN years. How do I get my next job when the company is now hiring YY developers instead?
    - There are lots of Level II jobs for YY, but I'm at level IV. Will eligibility rules even allow this transition?
    - There are some Level V positions for YY, but my level IV in XX doesn't really qualify me in a way that would pass a tech screen.