Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

> "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%"

My experience is no one really gets promoted/rewarded for these types of things or at least not beyond an initial one-off pat on the back. All anyone cares about is feature release velocity.

If it's even possible to reduce incidents by 80% then either your org had a very high tolerance for basically daily issues which you've now reduced to weekly, or they were already infrequent enough that 80% less takes you from 4/year to 1/year.. which is imperceptible to management and users.

That is dead, but I vouched for it.

People always overcomplicate this. Companies want to get the most out of their employees, for the least amount of money paid.

Promotions are supposed to incentivise people to stay, rather than leave. If the company never promoted anyone, people would leave. So there needs to be a path for promoting people. But that process doesn’t have to be transparent, or consistent, or fair - in-fact it rarely is.

You promote people who consistently overdeliver, on time, at or below cost, who are a pleasure to work with, who would benefit the company long term, who would be a pain to lose. A key precondition is that such people consistently get more done compared to other people with equal pay, otherwise, they don’t stand out and they are not promotion material.

What counts as overdelivering will vary based on specific circumstances. It’s a subjective metric. Are you involved with a highly visible project, or are you working on some BS nobody would miss if it got axed? Are you part of a small team, or are you in a bloated, saturated org? Are you the go-to person when shit hits the fan, or are you a nobody people don’t talk to? Are you consistent, or are you vague and unpredictable? Does your work impact any relevant bottom lines, or are you just part of a cost centre? It really isn’t rocket science, for the most part.

> It's not easy, but it's their work.

There's a significant asymmetry though, it's not just a bit more work. I'm a bit cynical here, but often it's easier to just overengineer and be safe than to defend a simple solution; obviously depending on the organization and its culture.

When you have a complex solution and an alternative is stacked up against it, everything usually boils down to a few tradeoffs. The simple solution is generally the one with the most tradeoffs to explain: why no HA, why no queuing, why no horizontally scalable, why no persistence, why no redundancy, why no retry, etc. Obviously not all of them will apply, but also obviously the optics of the extensive questioning will hinder any promotion even if you successfully justify everything.

In larger systems, what looks like “overengineering” can be deliberate risk management. In my experience, senior engineers do get promoted for simplicity but only when they can articulate the trade-offs and the future costs they are avoiding.