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The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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81–90 of 202 posts

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#81

Post by gwbas1c »

I was downranked once when switching jobs. I had significantly more experience than the people who I was working with, including the leadership, and it showed. There were some red flags during the interviews, but because of life circumstances, I felt like I couldn't say no.

The situation didn't end well. It didn't have to, but I place that firmly on the managements' inexperience.

(Side lesson: I suspect that situations like what I encountered are why a lot of people "age out" of tech. Although many people state that "ageism is real," I think a lot of younger managers just have trouble letting go when they work with people more experienced than they are.)

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#82

Post by gringoDan »

eru wrote: post #56
gringoDan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conclusion after working in tech for a few years: If you don't want to play the politics game, just interview with new companies and get a new role and a significant pay bump every 1-2 years. Sad that the incentives are set up this way.

It's not that sad, at least the churn makes knowledge and best practices bubble through the industry.

True!

I meant sad in the sense that if folks were properly incentivized to stay at an organization longer-term (10-20% pay bumps per year), I think we'd see more big innovations in technology – think NASA, Bell Labs, etc. – as opposed to incremental improvements.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#83

Post by infamouscow »

angrais wrote: post #46
mabbo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot of variability here. I've met Principal Engineers at Amazon who never write a line of code and barely do any mentoring (I don't like those PEs). But I've also worked with Senior and Principal Engineers who do incredible work, mentor, truly lead . They are force multipliers, making adjustments to the course of the organization in ways that have huge benefits and gains. And if you dropped these pe…

Given your emphasis on lead, do you have any recommendations for books or blogs to provide insight into how to be such a good leader?

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Jocko also has a very popular podcast where he further dispenses leadership principles.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#84

Post by rlewkov »

bitwize wrote: post #26

I'm a shitty business person, but a pretty good developer. I'd not do well in a position that had a business emphasis, like a management position. (And, unlike other incompetents, am not narcissistic enough to groom my image at others' expense, so my optics would be terrible.) So I'm not inclined to climb the corporate ladder and my ego suffers less of a blow from taking a downlevel in title. Just pay me and pay me w…

I have a friend who has worked at a few companies at what I thought were pretty average jobs. I asked him how he liked the jobs ... his response "the money is green". His priorities were bank 1st everything else second. He had no qualms about it ... I admire him for that.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#86

Post by hinkley »

nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

I’m in a similar spot, except I’m also the guy people come to for weird problems they don’t understand. The work I did day one is arguably one level above mine, and my first boss was on track to promote me but the little fucker quit a month before the annual review cycle and the next guy promoted way fewer people than he should have.

Now it’s been going on for so long that I’m not entirely sure how I will react if/when I do get promoted. I think we’ve gotten beyond, “about time” into some swear words. For starters they’d have to backdate the raise. I am about to start actively looking.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#87

Post by rmk »

e1g wrote: post #48
azdle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you me? I spent the last 3 years completely redeveloping the foundation of our platform which will save the company millions of dollars a year. I didn't do it alone or anything. But I started the project, was the only one to work on it full time throughout the whole project, defined the underlying architecture, and implemented most of the lowest layers. I poured all my energy into the project. We launched beginni…

It's a signal from the market ("employer") that what you currently offer is not what they currently value. If you desire greater rewards/ recognition, you need to discover what they value and decide if you want to offer that. Developers expect that work such as "refactoring", "platform architecture", "R&D", "investing into the future" has some intrinsic value to the business. At the company level, work such as "knowl…

This is true from anecdotal experience. However, what confuses things is that the "employer" simply doesn't know what it wants. The "employer" in this case is your immediate manager and, perhaps, a promotion committee that may include your peers. This set can have quite a bit of turnover in a company without good direction. The only constants that get recognized no matter the people (who may not have the ability or interest in evaluating technical contributions) are big talk, puffery, and unjustified confidence and optimism. Not to mention relentless positivity.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#88

Post by fifilura »

vbtemp wrote: post #2

I made a fairly popular reddit post recently on how I down-leveled my career in recent years. Each time I down-level, I get a raise in salary -- it's pretty great. What that permitted me to learn about myself is that - at the end of the day - I just like solving interesting and challenging problems, working with colleagues as equals, and creating products and solutions that I'm proud of. I have utterly no interest an…

While I fully agree with your sentiment, are you by any chance privileged white male?

Quote from TFA "For those in an underrepresented group, titles make a world of difference in establishing credibility."

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#89

Post by nostrademons »

MattGaiser wrote: post #66
DamnYuppie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a somewhat seasoned developer and former executive I can, sadly, state that raises and rewards are rarely tied to your output or how much it brings to the company. If your manager and executive leadership team are not actively marketing/hyping what your team is doing there is little to no hope of getting what you deserve. I get that this sounds "unfair" but there are some reasonable reasons for this. A company is…

How does one effectively do this self promotion?

Also alignment with upper executives is pretty critical. Pay careful attention to what they say at All-Hands and which teams they're spending their time with, and try to get on those teams. Try to be in the room when major decisions are made; understand the thought process that went into these decisions. If you can simulate your VP's thought process and predict what they're going to value next, you're at a huge advantage over most of your peers in the department, and you can also leverage that to help your management look good.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#90

Post by hinkley »

e1g wrote: post #48
azdle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you me? I spent the last 3 years completely redeveloping the foundation of our platform which will save the company millions of dollars a year. I didn't do it alone or anything. But I started the project, was the only one to work on it full time throughout the whole project, defined the underlying architecture, and implemented most of the lowest layers. I poured all my energy into the project. We launched beginni…

It's a signal from the market ("employer") that what you currently offer is not what they currently value. If you desire greater rewards/ recognition, you need to discover what they value and decide if you want to offer that. Developers expect that work such as "refactoring", "platform architecture", "R&D", "investing into the future" has some intrinsic value to the business. At the company level, work such as "knowl…

What they value and what they need often are not in alignment, and only briefly come into alignment when something fails. You can either shop for another team that has its priorities straight, move on, or play games.

Sometimes you have to develop a plan to fix something, and then not apply it until other people experience the pain themselves. Otherwise nobody knows how many land mines you’ve thrown yourself on. Games aside, it’s unfortunately part of delegation that they don’t fixate on what went well. They have other plates to keep spinning.

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