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> It's an enjoyable read, but in a similar vein as Harry Potter is an enjoyable read. Maybe it will provoke some thinking that's applicable to your work life, but it's more entertaining than educational, IMO.

That's the unfortunate reality with a lot of Substack type newsletters.

The real world truth is often so boring and simple that it can be summarized in a short blog post. Want to get promoted? Work on important projects for the company, build rapport and relationships in the company, build a reputation for getting things done on time with high quality and low drama. You'll either get promoted, or build a foundation upon which you can pivot into a promotion at another company.

That's boring to read, though, so much pop-business advice turns into ego-stroking stories about how the reader is morally superior to all of the other unprincipled ladder-climbers around them. There's a large appetite for stories about how the world is unfair, and there are many writers happy to deliver those stories.

I'm part of a mentorship program for junior developers. These kinds of articles have been detrimental to a lot of impressionable young people who are growing up convinced that the world is thoroughly corrupt and therefore the only way to win is to become corrupt yourself. In reality, if anyone finds themselves at a company where people are promoted based on lies, nepotism, and general corruption then you don't want to get promoted there anyway. Get out while you can, because any company that rewards people who play games over people who deliver results is doomed to go downhill. In the real world, the good companies really do identify and promote those who consistently deliver results.

There are tech or tech-adjacent companies with tens of thousands of employees that have around for decades, when not 100+ years, who are corrupted in more than one meaning of the world. And they pay decently well, when not top 10%. I may have worked in one of those.

You're a bit too optimistic.

This article isn't saying "be evil or be out-hustled by evil", it's saying "avoid high growth companies because they are full of charlatans".

Find a nice job at a small company growing organically.

Agreed. I read it as a criticism of VC-funded, growth-focused, investor driven companies and I believe the criticism is totally valid in that lens.

High growth companies have made a lot of employees very rich.

> Work on important projects for the company, build rapport and relationships in the company, build a reputation for getting things done on time with high quality and low drama.

This will not get you promoted beyond the middle rungs.

You'll need to say more :)

There's not a lot of room in the upper rungs. The audience of people trying to nab that promotion from VP to SVP at $FORTUNE500 is an awful small audience to write for.

and the number of people who are actually qualified to dispatch such advice is even smaller.

These pithy, cynical takes are devoid of any real claims or suggestions. What are you actually proposing as a way to the top rung? Gaming the system and being cutthroat?

I am not proposing anything. I am just observing what happens empirically. Doing these things tends to get people soft influence but no formal authority. It's simply what is.

You have never seen someone do good work, visibly, and be promoted for it?

Agreed. Being reliable and getting things done is not memorable. Someone who is actively getting in people's faces, pushing along agendas, meeting with others, and on the whole being "visible" as projects move along is more likely to be associated with getting things done than someone who quietly gets work done and is liked by everyone but does not make a big ado about it.

People get promoted not for what they do, but what they appear to do.

Not to disagree with your overall criticism, but:

> Want to get promoted? Work on important projects for the company, build rapport and relationships in the company, build a reputation for getting things done on time with high quality and low drama. You'll either get promoted, or build a foundation upon which you can pivot into a promotion at another company.

Did you answer the question posed in the article: Which of the top leaders in your company get there by doing this? The only common theme seems to be "build rapport and relationships in the company".

> These kinds of articles have been detrimental to a lot of impressionable young people

This article is a satire, similar to Starship Troopers movie

~~~

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)#Criti...

"too damn well-made for its own good" and said that it confused audiences and critics.

~~~

Similarly, "How to get promoted" may be confusing. But you may also use these "tips" to identify [and fire] employees which try to abuse your corporate promotion system.

> No, you can do anything you want and it won't show up in the SEC/Wall Street reported metrics, but you better believe Amazon has faster-acting internal metrics than that.

How would amazon metrics be faster? The main point is that a lot of large/systemic changes ("pay off tech debt") can take a long time to show up in any metric, giving you cover to get promoted as people don't think of timestamped metrics as time-delayed as they actually are.

Let's say you have internal metrics around feature cycle time.

If that number is getting ugly, you might be able to get some tech debt projects going. If you spend 3 months just on tech debt, ship 0 features, and then still have just as bad a feature cycle time in the 3 months after that as in the 3 months before... that can get noticed. And it's not gonna look great.

Whether or not your org does notice that or not is a question about the sort of company you're working for. The original article here assumes you're working at a fairly inefficient and unmotivated one.

The 3 years he quotes is from his perspective, which is from the view of "what company-spanning initiatives are we going to tackle" or "what teams and projects do we need to bootstrap or expand on?". It takes years for these things to get done and have the desired impact on the bottom line, but within those years are individuals and teams growing their respective businesses. Those businesses are absolutely monitored yearly/quarterly/weekly at some level of abstraction in the company.

Yes effects are measures quarterly. But causes for those effects are not visible in 1 quarterly.

How long it takes for work to have impact depends greatly on the scope of that work and the level of abstraction you're viewing the work at.

Part of the problem here is the place in the blog ascribes value to where you are rather than what you did. If nobody is asking how you influenced the current state of being but is instead just evaluating the person presiding over current success, then the behavior described is unsurprising.

Thank you, came to say something similar. This is basically Machiavellian corporate politics, by someone clearly bitter at the way the system works.

The bit I found useful in there is the idea that the people who don't care about quality still might care about promotion - for some people it's just a job, and for others skipping on quality is a way to be seen to produce a lot of quantity. It's easy to see how 1000 lines per day is probably going to get you promoted in a hurry, regardless of whether there are twice as many bugs in that code than the average of the code base and twice as much code as there needs to be. Those multipliers make a massive difference in the long run, but are probably too small to detect in individual commits.

> "I can do anything I want for three years and it won't show up in the metrics!" No, you can do anything you want and it won't show up in the SEC/Wall Street reported metrics, but you better believe Amazon has faster-acting internal metrics than that.

I can't speak for Amazon, but what he said is true in my company. We have metrics, but a 3 year horizon sounds right. Rarely do bad endeavors get killed quicker than that.

A lot of times people yearn for promotion only because their peers are promoted. At least that's what I saw in Uber. When Uber had only a handful of senior/staff engineers, few people were vocal about promotion. But when Uber suddenly promoted a large number of people, everyone was screaming for a promotion. In contrast, few engineers in Netflix complained about titles for all ICs had the same title - this may be selection bias, though.

That is to be expected, similar to the way open discussion of salaries puts upwards pressure on salaries. When Bob sees Alice get promoted, he asks himself why. Maybe it's obvious that Alice is a better employee, but not by so much that Bob feels it's out of his reach. So he works harder and then asks his boss if now wouldn't be a good time for that promotion for him too.

Or maybe it's not obvious why Alice got promoted and Bob didn't, so Bob asks his manager. Hopefully the manager can explain the reasoning in a way that Bob can understand, and Bob can get to work to level-up or can accept that he's just not as good as Alice. (If the manager can't come up with a good reason...well...that's a problem. For the manager.)

If no one's getting promoted, then there's not much point in asking for a promotion. May as well keep your eye on jobs at other companies if you'd like to get ahead. Sometimes companies try to keep the promotions quiet, in an apparent effort to suppress the masses clamoring for a promotion. I suppose it works, as much as suppressing salary discussion works. ("Here's your annual raise this year, you did a _great_ job, this 3% shows that, almost _no one_ gets 3%, this is super high. Great job, Bob! Oh, and don't worry about that promotion, it's super rare to get promoted within your first x years at the company, it'll come...")