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

andrew.grahamyooll.com

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

#81

Post by wrsh07 »

bluGill wrote: post #34
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 you…

I would encourage everyone to identify when these rules don't apply!

However, I think these rules are generally safer than the claim that you should do something other than what you've said you would do (or, perhaps, other than what your manager has said you will do)

And if you are doing something much more important, there's a new rule which was probably worth emphasizing more: communicate aggressively. Over communicate. If you're doing A but your manager thinks you are doing B, communicate quickly and often about why you are doing A, what the impact is, and when you will get back to B (or whether B should be deprioritized)

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

#83

Post by jimbokun »

sailfast wrote: post #44

This works well if your company culture doesn’t abhor an IC or manager trying to push for improvements in places that are not their responsibility. Unfortunately there are a lot of places that do dislike this - and it may result in you getting fired instead of promoted :)

Sounds like a company set up for failure.

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

#84

Post by jimbokun »

JohnMakin wrote: post #3

This is just recycled advice that's been given for 30+ years. "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" etc. The thing is this only really "works" in healthy or semi-healthy environments. You could just as easily have an infantile, poorly qualified, easily threatened middle manager above you that will perceive this kind of behavior as an attack and take the legs out from under you in ways that you have very…

Then the only way to progress your career is to leave the company.

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

#85

Post by jimbokun »

another_twist wrote: post #38

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 yo…

Worst case is those responsibilities you took on can be added to your resume to find a higher level job at a different company.

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

#86

Post by dangus »

munchbunny wrote: post #23

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 d…

I think the only possible flaw with this idea is you might not know.

I find that my organizational and leadership skills demonstrated in my role suffer when I am working on individual contributor work that requires deep focus and perhaps even isolation.

At the same time, I’ve handled other roles at other companies that required more leadership and team mentorship, where you’d look at my actions and feel more like I was management material. But in my current role with my current responsibilities it’s hard for myself let alone someone else to imagine that I would make an effective leader, since my job basically dictates that I don’t do that on a daily basis.

The day to day needs and responsibilities of the business often get in the way of the person actually demonstrating that they will excel when they do something else.

I don’t have any kind of direct solution for this specific dilemma. I think in my situation my manager should make more opportunities available but hasn’t been doing so due to the daily routine of putting out fires.

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

#87

Post by rivetfasten »

mywittyname wrote: post #65
michaelt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're at a larger company, then you'll probably have to line up another to get promoted. Having one foot out the door is often the ammo that managers need to get HR and leadership to approve a promotion. Of course, we've been told to never accept a counter offer at your job.

> Of course, we've been told to never accept a counter offer at your job.

Do you have a example article? I haven't encountered the advice, but I'm curious if the reasoning matches my guess.

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

#88

Post by jimbokun »

cletus wrote: post #55

So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advice. But still this article presumes a lot. In my experience, managers will naturally partition their reports into three buckets: their stars, their problems and their worker bees. The worker bees…

Yeah the only solution to avoid this is to find a company where building and selling a product actually matters. In large companies it’s too easy to fudge the connection between individual contributions and financial impact.

If you’re not looking to become a founder, companies right around 100 employees is the sweet spot in my (very limited) experience.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #63

While this is true... it's also letting yourself be massively taken advantage of, and underpaid. Yes, the best way to get promoted is to do work above your level. The problem is, you're not getting paid what you deserve for that . If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level . Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the proc…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by jimbokun »

bluGill wrote: post #40
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.

Hmm maybe this is a good use case for LLMs to focus more on those higher level objectives.

Until the productivity boost of using LLMs well is just assumed for all ICs.

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