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The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#61

Post by stadium »

nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

That's hard, I've been there too. I went into role where nothing was documented, and I built up a knowledge base to get all of the tribal knowledge out of people's heads. There were all sorts of manual scripts running "hot" on production to fix issues, very few of them documented. It made my ramp up time much harder than it should have been. And my efforts made it way easier (and safer) for the team and everyone who was hired after me. That year I got a lower performance rating.

The silver lining was that I gained skills that helped me land my next gig, along with a nice bump in pay. I responded to a cold call email from a recruiter and from that began a more fulfilling career trajectory where I was appreciated more.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#62

Post by DamnYuppie »

nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

As a somewhat seasoned developer and former executive I can, sadly, state that raises and rewards are rarely tied to your output or how much it brings to the company. If your manager and executive leadership team are not actively marketing/hyping what your team is doing there is little to no hope of getting what you deserve. I get that this sounds "unfair" but there are some reasonable reasons for this. A company is huge there are many teams working on multiple projects, some of which have more executive hype visibility than others, where executives lust/focus money follows. If your project isn't one of those the best you can hope for is compensation the following year once the benefits are noticed, if they are noticed. Also note in any organization there is a never ending line of people who feel their contributions deserve more remuneration than others, so you have to make yourself standout from this bunch.

That being said the best way to get large raises in your company is to network and market yourself and your accomplishments LOUDLY and OFTEN. If this makes you uncomfortable then the absolute best way to get a raise overall is to leave for a new company; don't worry in two years you will be welcomed back at your current company if you want to return.

I am at the stage in my career now where I just want a solid funnel of work to rip through on technology that I enjoy working on and a competitive salary. I have a full life outside of work that brings me fulfillment and joy so I no longer need accolades and attention from work, honestly the less they notice me the happier I am! My job is for money and to keep my mind sharp, if I am unhappy I leave if I am happy I stay. I spent years climbing the ladder, learning to network and market myself and my team, sadly I learned that it was all a waste of time for me and I have more overall life enjoyment being a well thought of and compensated developer!

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#63

Post by ryandrake »

azdle wrote: post #21
nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

Are you me? I spent the last 3 years completely redeveloping the foundation of our platform which will save the company millions of dollars a year. I didn't do it alone or anything. But I started the project, was the only one to work on it full time throughout the whole project, defined the underlying architecture, and implemented most of the lowest layers. I poured all my energy into the project. We launched beginni…

One thing I wish someone told me earlier in my career is that the skills and activities you need to perform to get promoted are totally different than the skills and activities you need to perform to get your job done, which by the way, are different than the skills and activities you need to perform in order to pass the interview and get hired. Not "related" or "complementary" to the job you are hired for--totally different.

Promotion is about marketing. Getting your name in a favorable light in front of the deciders, and projecting an image of "someone who is like other people who we promote." Different companies do this differently. At some of them, it's about directly brown-nosing the higher-ups. At others it's about getting in the right cool-kid clique. At others it's about playing golf with key influencers or talking about sportsball with them in the lunch room. At others, who pretend to be merit based, it's about writing docs and "evidence" of your good work, but don't be fooled, those docs are marketing material, not technical evidence. Getting promoted is a separate job skill you need to learn, just like debugging and DevOps. Except it's a skill that does not benefit the company's bottom line at all. You have to set aside time and stop doing the work that you were hired for, stop solving the technical problems, and switch gears to doing the unrelated "getting promoted" work.

Nobody in leadership or HR is going to explain it this way, of course. You kind of have to learn about it organically or listen to someone like me who had to learn it the hard way.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#64

Post by gwbas1c »

geoffjentry wrote: post #7

The thing that many folks don't understand is that it's not that "Titles don't matter", it's that "Titles don't matter when compared across companies". There's not a universal definition of say, "senior software engineer", so comparing titles across companies will always be an apples/oranges exercise. Titles do matter, but only when in the proper context.

Titles only matter to me when I need what they communicate.

Once, when working in a distributed team where I was going to be the lead, it was critical to me that I was "promoted" to a more senior title than the people I was working with. I didn't care what the title was, nor did I care for the money. (I didn't get a raise.)

All that mattered was that the title established who was in charge. It didn't matter what the title was.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#65

Post by eru »

commandlinefan wrote: post #10

When I see "senior" in front of any job title, I generally ignore it as essentially meaningless (and I've been a "senior" for about 20 years now). Unless a job title and description comes with actual managerial responsibilities (so director, VP, etc.), it doesn't seem to correlate in any way with pay, respect, job security or any real say in priorities.

Even VP doesn't have to mean much.

In tech, a VP is a big deal. In finance, everyone is a VP.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#66

Post by MattGaiser »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #62
nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

As a somewhat seasoned developer and former executive I can, sadly, state that raises and rewards are rarely tied to your output or how much it brings to the company. If your manager and executive leadership team are not actively marketing/hyping what your team is doing there is little to no hope of getting what you deserve. I get that this sounds "unfair" but there are some reasonable reasons for this. A company is…

How does one effectively do this self promotion?

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#67

Post by lostcolony »

endtime wrote: post #41
nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

> I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted again this cycle. As a FAANG SWE, what I am reading is "I spent two years cranking out code without doing any design work. My manager and TL never suggested I write a design doc, or didn't give me opportunities to do s…

Designing != documenting design.

To get promoted in FAANG (and many large tech companies), yes, you need to document it.

Interestingly, whether it works or not is completely unrelated to whether it's documented or not. In fact, the types of useful documentation (descriptions of how decisions were reached, known tradeoffs, API contracts, etc) often are completely different than the types of documentation management asks for (box diagrams that no one but management looks at). And the timeline for generating it is often different as well (management oftentimes asks for documentation before implementation, where such documentation runs the risk of being an incorrect blueprint; what is useful is documenting along the way).

Valuing documentation can be done well, but pretty much every place I've seen it as an organizational requirement it has been a checkbox (and definitely running afoul of the agile manifesto, which makes it doubly frustrating, when an org also says "we're agile because we do scrum" or whatever).

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#68

Post by fsociety »

pcmoney wrote: post #16

“For example, a senior title at Big Tech typically expects more from an engineer than a small developer agency, a non-tech-first company, or a recently founded start-up does” This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. Typically have a narrow specialty and a good grasp on how it fits into the larger Org’s strategy etc. Senior engineers at a small shop do EVERYTHING. Front end, b…

Sometimes it is. In my experience I was expected to do less at a start-up but to do it well. Yes, I worked across the stack and often would find myself doing varied things but instead of stacking more on in a day, it was more like quickly shifting priorities each day.

Now at a larger company I’m expected to spin many plates so to speak. I’m measured on my ability to write code, pitch projects, design architecture, manage cross functional relationships, interview many candidates a week, have company outreach of some form, mentor junior members, deal with organizational politics (this is the big draining one), participate in project reviews, run projects for new employees to work on, provide feedback to all my peers, tons of personal development planning and self-reviews, manage third-party relationships, respond to incidents and be on-call for things not related to my team, learn new things every year aka personal development, and more.

And if I fail in one of the four areas in a performance review I can be put on a performance review plan. I’m making it sound more grim than it is, but for my experience there are just more things to do and there are no compromising them.

Maybe other individuals are better at this or work with a manager that has less expectations, but this is my experience. I think I was a better programmer at the startup, but I have more organizational impact at the bigger company.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#69

Post by drivebycomment »

vbtemp wrote: post #2

I made a fairly popular reddit post recently on how I down-leveled my career in recent years. Each time I down-level, I get a raise in salary -- it's pretty great. What that permitted me to learn about myself is that - at the end of the day - I just like solving interesting and challenging problems, working with colleagues as equals, and creating products and solutions that I'm proud of. I have utterly no interest an…

All the things you mentioned important to you are indeed important stuff, and you are not wrong to prioritize them. But that doesn't mean you should completely ignore the title. Think of the title as giving you more freedom to choose. By completely ignoring, you are potentially missing the extra freedom you can have in choosing your problem and team. So, I would agree you don't want to chase a title, but as a secondary nice-to-have goal, it absolutely is worth considering.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#70

Post by TrackerFF »

lennoff wrote: post #8

I think the key takeaway is to never believe when someone says "Don't worry, you'll get promoted in no time".

I've noticed that unless you live in a city where one can switch jobs in under a week, not have to re-locate, or take a big hit on the commute, companies know (knew? At least pre-COVID and rise of work from home) that they have the upper hand.

Even in countries with extremely strong labor laws, companies are not shy to pull every trick in the book to drag out promotions. I've seen examples where it took close to 12 months for someone to get their promotions finalized, and thus a new tittle/higher pay. It took that long time because the employer knew they were the highest paying in the area (albeit underpaying the employees in question, due to not having received promotions in years), and very much locked to their jobs.

When people get established with a mortgage, family, and what not, it's much harder to just drop everything and move away for some extra bucks. So my advice to young devs / engineers would be to do as much career climbing as you can, before you settle down. Once a company knows there's little chance of you leaving, they'll slow down things all over.

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