Seafaring for Women in Software Engineering – Part I – Performance and Promotion

The Tech industry can be a stormy sea, so I'd like to share a few seawomanship advice to my fellow young and younger women software engineers. In this first part, I talk about performance and promotions, and how to be the captain of your own career. All aboard!

My best engineers don't want a promotion, but they wanted to be optimally and continuously rewarded both financially and with the ability to be able to decline non-meaningful or low-interest tasks. As Gary Tan's quote said: learn or earn, but better: both. A good engineer should be getting that.

That is excellent advice but the article doesn’t explain why this should apply more for females, and that is crucial.

As a male that scores higher in the agreeability personality metric than the average female and that females average much higher in that metric than males cross-culturally I am in a unique position to reflect on this. People that measure higher in agreeability do worse at administering their own needs even after they are aware of what needs to be done, so career elevation then becomes a self-reflection challenge as much as an administrative challenge.

As a point of consideration think about why/how the military does a much better job of retaining and promoting females than does the tech industry despite it being a far more masculine environment. One reason is that the military strongly advocates the administrative guidance in the article over and over again. Secondly, there is a deliberate process for promotion in the military that requires completion of education at each level and a minimal time in grade. There is no mystery or social mastery to the process.

First, the author is right. This is the way the world works, and if you want to get ahead, play the game. But I have strong contempt for management throwing up their hands and saying “it’s your promotion, own it”.

Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.

When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.

> In a for-profit organization, the optimal behavior for the company is to employ workers at the lowest pay that the worker is willing to accept.

I've been around the block enough times to know this, but I still hate it. Why do we give so much of our only lives to this system?

> So there is no incentive for a manager to promote you or give you a raise unless you ask for it.

Even if you do, theres still no incentive. The only incentive is threatening to leave when the cost to the org of your doing so is greater than the cost of promotion.

Couple of points:

1. The above are why (after 30 years as a dev) I'm trying to build something on my own. But its hard.

2. I'm not a woman, but the points above aren't really gender-specific. I do appreciate the substantial additional challenges faced by women in tech, though.