101–110 of 114 posts
I don't understand how people who can not execute and lack technical expertise will be a better fit for engineering leadership than those with strong technical skills ?
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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 diff…
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 yea…
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.
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Jumping on here as this is a widespread issue in tech writing. "The first time you use an initialism or acronym in your document, the words should be written out with the short form placed in parentheses immediately after."
Thanks for this tip. Writing in this form definitely doesn't come naturally to me so it's great to be learning not just about the topic but also on how to better my communication.
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> 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…
How many hops through the FAANG circuit did you make, if you mind me asking?
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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…
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…
Doesn’t most of this also describes an engineering manager? What’s the distinguishing role of a director vs a manager?
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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…
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…
A person may be operating at a level that would qualify them for the new role for quite some time, but unless and until management have a need for someone in that role, the promotion won't happen.
That's why (in my experience) promotions happen more frequently when finding a new job: the fastest way to make sure the employee's readiness for a promotion lines up with business need is to find a business that already needs someone for that role.
> 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 t…
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.
Doesn’t most of this also describes an engineering manager? What’s the distinguishing role of a director vs a manager?
In many orgs a director level role manages managers. And there is definitely a different skillset as it goes beyond management into leadership.