So You Want to be a Big Shot: Advice on playing the promotion game • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by mlhpdx » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 5:10 AM UTC

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #30

mlhpdx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a conclusion grown by thinking of promotions as a win/lose against your peers? That’s never been my experience. I was less capable and valuable than my peers in my first role but was promoted quickly and repeatedly by learning quickly from them.

I'm talking about senior level promotions, where the compensation is exceeding 400-500k a year. Not fresh grad roles

I’ve looked for the same in executive roles as well (though I’m not really interested in a promotion at this point). It always makes sense to work with people to learn from and respect.

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

#32

Post by keernan » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 5:12 AM UTC

apimade wrote: post #28

andy99 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a joke (and the reference is great) but this is actually what happens. It's where the idea of "Lead" came from, and in many other industries it's much worse. It's why in business there's "(Acting) Associate Senior Execuitve Global Managing Director, Clients and Markets" type positions, so nobody can definitively compare themselves to one another ("oh, so you'll be reporting to me") and people can feel l…

VP’s at Goldman being 25 year olds with 3 years experience is hilarious.

I don't know Goldman at all, but I know there are plenty of corporations engaging in labor fraud by giving everyone and the kitchen sink the title of "Vice President" because of the benefits under the labor laws. Doing so is fraud if it is clear the title is given to hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who actually perform no functions that warrant an executive title. I worked at a Fortune 500 company with a total workforce ~10,000 of whom ~50% had the title of Vice President and another ~25% Assistant Vice President.

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

#33

Post by pzs » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 6:56 AM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #12

This is quite unsound advice, from someone who happened to grow their career in a period where the software industry was growing faster than it could find talent, so job hopping was the best way to grow. Maybe not bad advice, just ineffective in any mature industry where promotions are typically internal, changing jobs will almost never land you into a more senior position - unless you are really, really good at CV s…

I agree with you power game view. The cooperation can even extend beyond the current job. That is, when managers move to another company, they attract some key people from their team to the new place. (There are other incentives for managers to do so: e.g. to show they are effective at recruiting.)

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

#34

Post by agos » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 11:50 AM UTC

sam_bristow wrote: post #23

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #15

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 some…

Joining a team with short tenure and high turnover is high risk. Often there are very good reasons noone sticks around and you'll just end up burned out.

Also when your manager keeps changing (as it happens with high turnover) it’s really difficult to make a good promotion case

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

#35

Post by angarg12 » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #17

angarg12 wrote: post #14

This advice is not wrong, but honestly it could be way more cynical. The first step to get promoted is to understand the promotion process of your current company, if they have a formal one. It took me one year to learn how promos work in my current company, and that was one whole year of progress lost. Then if you really want to get promoted fast, you need to optimize to meet the promo criteria. Often that is in lin…

> 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…

Oh yes this happens all the time!

Last year an engineer in my org got promoted to Senior Staff. In order to get there he alienated and burnt out many other engineers, including me.

But guess what? he got the promotion, which is what he was gunning for, and he only alienated his peers. Leadership still support him and think he is a genius (BTW for doing things like taking credit from others). Also he seems to have chilled down a lot since the promo, so if you only interacted with him afterwards you would have a very different opinion of him.

There is this idea that tech is a small world, your fame will precede you and such, but in practice I have seen the opposite. It seems way too easy to outrun your mistakes, either by changing teams or companies. I guess that is why it is relatively common to switch companies right after a promo. I have seen not so brilliant people greatly exaggerate their accomplishments and jump to greater highs.

They say that you can't fool all the people all the time, but that framing is wrong. You only need to fool the right people long enough. And in tech, long enough seems to be 2-3 years, after which you can jump ship and rinse and repeat.

I don't know about your company, but in mine executives never get fired. They always "leave for new and exciting opportunities" or "to spend more time with their families". I remember reading an article from an entrepreneur saying that a high % of executive hires are duds, but this is often kept under wraps to save face for both the company and the executive.

Bottom line, min-maxing your career progress *can* backfire, but statistically you'll be ahead by doing it than not. And you can minimize the downside by outrunning your mistakes, moving to other teams or companies (this applies less with the current job market).

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

#36

Post by Yoric » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #16

rr808 wrote: post #2

The vast majority of devs are under 30. Already most people are "senior" after 5 years experience. What are we going to do when this cohort wants to get promoted into architects and managers in 10-20 years time? There just aren't enough senior jobs.

> The vast majority of devs are under 30. How do you arrive at this conclusion? “Under 30” but old enough to have graduated college leaves only ~8 years of career. Unless you think the majority of devs are retiring before the age of 45-50, this doesn’t make sense at all. I think you might be in a bubble with a lot of young devs, but it’s a big industry out there. Devs don’t just disappear or retire when we hit our 30…

Anecdotally, I've been one of the oldest developers in my companies since I started in the industry. I have no idea where old developers go, but it's starting to feel a bit lonely here.

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

#37

Post by Yoric » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 8:08 PM UTC

frewr wrote: post #13

philjohn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff and above are fundamentally different jobs to Senior, which is why Senior is a terminal level at most companies. It's about scaling yourself through others, and not everyone wants to do that, and that's OK.

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.…

I'm a staff engineer. My work is quite different from what I did as a senior. I spend much more time investigating/solving organizational problems, attempting to make knowledge available cross-teams, extracting requirements from existing projects, proposing new projects, etc.

When I'm not doing that, I'm working on deep technical issues, but I already did that as a senior/tech lead.

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

#38

Post by robocat » Mon, Feb 26, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

mlhpdx wrote: post #22

The advice I would give a person coming to me with that question would be tough to say: I don’t know if it’s possible to grow one’s career today as quickly or as far as I was fortunate enough to do. It’s just a very different dynamic overall. I don’t mean to be cynical, or throw cold water on anyone’s ambitions, but I do want to add a different perspective here for those that care enough to read on. I entered the pro…

> (looking back) would have done better financially and felt better about it had I pursued my own path (entrepreneurship)

Perhaps just normal regret from perfect hindsight? I believe doing a startup was easier in the past than now because there were more opportunities and less competition. Now a software startup is more likely to be in a crowded market - or if you do find a unique niche others will quickly copy? Still plenty of opportunities but maybe start in a niche?

> > I missed opportunities to become truly expert by taking on new roles.

Great technical skills in narrow areas are not that useful in a founder. Jumping in the deep end and soft-skills and solving problems without help are more useful: and your career sounds like you got more of that.

I suspect your career path has left you with a far better ability to found a startup than you think. The only block is that we get conditioned to working in a large company and changing gears is hard. If you had the personality to succeed in a startup, you can still do so.

Maybe unwanted advice and I've only really had experience in my own startup so perhaps not helpful! I would also suggest avoiding VC - VCs select for certain types of failure that you don't want. Also you will always lose (extremely assymetrical game with long term players - the field and rules are also biased).