Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got

> 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.

100% agreed. Just as importantly, you also need to be aware of what type of an environment you are in and plan accordingly.

Sometimes, you are just in an environment where it is somewhere between extremely improbable and nearly impossible to get promoted. At that point, you would be better served to put more effort into changing that environment, instead of chasing the grind. I learned that one the hard way a few years ago, at, ironically, Google.

I was on track to a promo, got a documented track record, got the backing of multiple managers + my team lead, etc. But guess what? Another reorg happened shortly before the cutoff for the review cycle, i got a new manager who literally just met me for the first time, and my chances tanked to essentially zero (which is understandable, because I don’t see how a manager who just discovered my existence a week prior would be able to effectively back my promo package). Since then, I had an average of 3-5 major reorgs and 1-2 manager changes per year. As I came to eventually realize, this type of a dysfunctional environment wasn’t conductive to a good career velocity.

Needless to say, my decision to just put my head in the sand and grind harder to compensate for this kind of organizational instability was stupid. It would’ve definitely been a better bet (in terms of time/effort, career trajectory, and compensation) to put even just a portion of that effort into changing my environment, as opposed to trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction with raw work effort.

TLDR: if you care about having a good promotion velocity, focus on the biggest blocker in your specific situation. Whether it is the lack of track record demonstrating sustained effort at the L+1 level, or your environment being dysfunctional in ways that make promotions improbable, etc. Just gotta keep the eyes on the prize, and pick the solutions that are the most appropriate for your individual situation (instead of blindly just doing "XYZ because I read that it was a great career advice" in a single-minded manner).

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.

Great point. And I think this is why I love the framing in the OP.

“Do more” is a failure mode and path to burnout. “Do what I’m doing and you’re not doing” is a cue that an ambitious engineer can reflect on constantly.

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.

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