Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

andrew.grahamyooll.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 286 posts

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

#31

Post by michaelt »

amflare wrote: post #5

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".

The second secret to getting promoted is working at a company that's growing.

If you're at a 50 employee company that grows to 250 employees there will be many empty team leader positions. And what you lack in hands-on management experience you make up for in knowledge of the business, its products/processes, and being a reliable known quantity. That extra responsibility will turn into more money fast.

On the other hand, if the company's headcount is largely stable and the employee turnover low? Well, there might not be an empty position until someone a level above you resigns, retires or gets fired. And when that happens - you're probably not the only ambitious person at your level. In this case, the payoff from extra effort is much less certain.

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

#32

Post by reg_dunlop »

amflare wrote: post #5

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".

Exactly.

Where's the guarantee for recognition of future growth....if they don't recognize past growth?

The biggest gripe I have about articles such as this is that it assumes a static perspective of "now, into the future" and it doesn't account for "all the time before now".

If I'm having a conversation akin to the one that opens the blog post, then presumably I've been at the company for a while. Conversations like that don't just happen between CTO and engineer unless there's some time vested in the company for both.

A CTO saying "take my job" as a non-sequitur is sus, IMHO. Now if it's said in the context of "here's a raise, and if you want another one....try to take my job", well now there's some decent context for the ask and a reason to believe that future growth will be compensated.

The best prediction of future performance is past behavior. That goes for mgmt as well as pee-on.

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

#33

Post by GMoromisato »

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.

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

#34

Post by bluGill »

wrsh07 wrote: post #26

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…

I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.

The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".

Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.

Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).

In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".

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

#35

Post by niam »

triyambakam wrote: post #27

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.

Honestly that just seems like normal English.

To refer to something as "team-level" seems so absurdly unspectacular, relative to the other kinds of signals that exist for sussing out AI writing, that I'm surprised it was worthy of mentioning at all.

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

#36

Post by bluGill »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #18

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 supe…

Often you need not only to be at the higher level, but someone to call out that if they don't promote you you might leave. I've seen a lot cases (at many companies) where one person that everyone knows is good quitting for a promotion gets a dozen others promoted in the next few months. So if you realize you are not getting a promotion your leaving may be the trigger to get your coworkers promoted.

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

#37

Post by paodealho »

TZubiri wrote: post #13

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,…

Interesting... brazilian portuguese has this exact same saying, though it's rarely used. "Muito cacique pra pouco índio".

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

#38

Post by another_twist »

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.

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

#39

Post by normie3000 »

wrsh07 wrote: post #26

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…

> "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it"

This sounds bad to me. Why throw AI output at your colleagues if you haven't verified it?

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

#40

Post by bluGill »

tonymet wrote: post #28

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 hi…

The problem is when you reach SR the next step is often so far removed that you can't have that impact without not doing your real job. A jr to mid-level engineer: just be better at what you do. However Sr to the next level is a whole different way of working and you can't do those things and also write the code that a sr is expected to write.
Post reply on HN