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

Back when I was working as salaried employee, I never asked for a promotion or a raise. Not once. But I got them! Meanwhile, I watched coworkers spend years fighting for promotions, taking on so much more work than I would ever agree to, and were repeatedly denied. Eventually, they would give up and get a job elsewhere. Some did manage to get promoted, but it was grueling.

These coworkers weren't less skilled than I was. I would say many of them were actually more capable, despite my position being ranked higher.

A lot of comments here are talking about "healthy" work cultures and whatnot. I worked for medium-sized tech companies that you've heard of with great engineering cultures and a healthy approach to work-life balance. I don't believe that "healthy" results in getting recognized for going above and beyond.

Others are mentioning office politics. I did not befriend coworkers, did not make enemies, etc. I simply did my work.

I'm sure many of you have had the experience that if you make a mistake—not necessarily at work, but just in general—and then apologize profusely, you will be treated worse than if you were more casual or didn't even apologize at all. I find that making yourself "smaller" will often result in people taking advantage of you. Similarly, it seems to me that working super hard will simply raise people's baseline expectations of you, and they will exploit that. This isn't necessarily a conscious thing on behalf of your boss(es), but it's absolutely something that happens.

Given all of that, my advice is to simply do your job. Over time, you will gain more experience, and that experience will potentially turn into promotions naturally. If not, then get a new job. Note however, that I'm not a proponent of frequent job hopping (I never spent less than three years at a company).

If you're not self-employed, then your work is making someone else rich. No need to make them even richer if you're not getting compensated for it.

Stop saying engineer when you mean programmer.

Do you guys have any advice for this situation?

Generally everyone in a team should be working towards some shared goal, there's no level at which you can be a chaos agent and not serve some higher purpose. The difference at this level transition is that you realise that for yourself -- someone doesn't need to remind you of the goal and nudge you back on course. That same realisation is not going to cut it at higher levels.

For me the general version of this advice is not something you can just tell the person who's being promoted, it's collective advice, for them, their manager, their tech lead: everyone needs to agree that this person needs to be given more rope, they need to do something useful with that (i.e. not hang themselves with it), the people around them need to watch out for when they start tying a noose and help them untie it (already regretting this analogy), and that's how you get promoted.

The rope takes different forms for different levels. I'll use the level scale I'm familiar with, starting with a newly graduated engineer at L3:

- L3 -> L4. You help decide how to build the feature.

- L4 -> L5. You help decide what features are worth building, and are trusted to maintain them.

- L5 -> L6. You help shape the work and ongoing maintenance of ~10 people's work (what products are worth building and how), over a time horizon of 6 months to a year.

- L6 -> L7. ~50 people's work, 1-2 years.

- L7 -> L8. ~200 people's work, 2-5 years.

- L8 -> L9. Things start to get fuzzy. The pattern suggests that you have a hand in ~1000 people's work, which is possible to do in the moment, but rare. There's two ways I can think of: you're either a world expert in your field, or you have set the technical strategy well for your organisation as it grew to this size.

This is just based on my experience, working largely on infrastructure teams both in big tech and in start ups as both an IC and a manager (currently an IC).