So You Want to be a Big Shot: Advice on playing the promotion game

As with any scarce resource, the most effective people will get them.

This piece is to help people be marginally more effective and be one of the ones that gets it.

PS: your question assumes stable demand for software engineer, but I'm completely uncertain whether it will grow stay flat or disappear. It all will depend on how AI goes, as well and overall economic development and digitization of the economy.

It's not fundamentally different, and all engineers should be scaling their impact. Staff engineers who think like this tend to be the most useless engineers, since they eschew real work in favor of appearing politically powerful with lots of cross-team impact. Scaling impact is good, but real work often requires being deep in the trenches.

The engineering ladder is one of the worst things to happen to this industry. Sometimes cross-team is the easy stuff, and solving some deep technical issue has the most impact.

People here hate leetcode and IQ tests but they are far better filters than "job level" where I've seen many principal engineers failing to write basic code.

In big tech, I have found the following to be critical for engineers.:

TLDR: Team selection is 70% of it.

1. Find team with high turnover, overall low tenure. Avoid high tenure teams at literally all costs. The politics will be high, and there will be a line to get promoted. Try to figure out if someone is being primed to be promoted. Do not join the team if this is the case.

2. Further filter for teams that are somewhat business critical, legacy tech, and are failing all of the time.

3. Unfortunately, this one is very important. Find management that looks like you, was educated like you, and overall is very receptive to you on first interaction. DO NOT DOWNPLAY this. People at FAANG promote based on natural affinity.

4. Understand the parameters to get promoted, notify your manager of your intentions. DO NOT TRY TO INNOVATE. Hit all deadlines right on time or before. NEVER take on extra projects before hitting the deadline, removing all extra work, only ever work on tracked tasks with documented high profile outcomes.

5. Do this for 2-4 years, if you havent got promoted by then, leave.

> Then if you really want to get promoted fast, you need to optimize to meet the promo criteria.

This gets repeated all the time, but it’s easy to overdo it.

It’s true that you’re not going to get promoted if you don’t meet the promotion criteria, so you have to meet the criteria if you want to move up.

However, I’m seeing more and more juniors who think promotion criteria are some game they’re going to min-max, and that I have to promote them if they check certain boxes. They do weird things like ignore their assigned work and spend all their time working on a high-visibility side project, or ignore the way work is assigned and try to do only the things they see as promotion-worthy. Or other times they’re just difficult to work with, unliked by their peers, and avoided by people who don’t want to deal with their politics. Then they can’t understand why we didn’t promote them to team lead despite their work on that one high-profile thing earlier this year.

If you play it too much like a game, it’s obvious and starts to backfire. If you go fully cynical on the process, it’s almost guaranteed to backfire. I’ve seen some people included in layoffs mostly because their constant promotion-seeking competitiveness turned into pervasive toxicity and everyone was looking for the first opportunity to remove them.

Maybe at some companies the pure game theory mode works out, but you have to build relationships and be a good person to work with. At some point, the “game theory” approach just looks like “do a good job and make relationships in the process”.

If the point is to get better at your craft, pursuing rapid promotion (especially into management) is antithetical to the goal. Craft comes from practice.

I’m sure there are all sorts of cynical strategies that are more effective for getting promoted, but if you love programming then putting the love into your programming will probably work out alright for you.