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First, I would ask your manager to list a specific sequence of projects and outcomes that would be promotable. Specific. This really helps identify whether there is a mismatch in your expectations.

One thing I see at Google is people thinking that they can get promoted just by doing more work that is high quality. When actually each promotion comes from doing qualitatively different kinds of work. Smashing OKRs doesn't matter one bit. This can be frustrating for people who don't communicate specifically about the process requirements with their manager since they look at their work and see it as better than their work N years ago and say "wtf why no promotion".

Good points. And I actually did bring up discussion on "specifics". For two quarters, I was given specifics of the kind: "improve delivery" and "better something" etc. And I did them diligently.

I'm learning more and more that the "specifics" are really hand holding the manager into committing and holding them accountable. Which is SO CHILDISH. No wonder highly paid tech workers jump ship all the time.

I'd try one more time and also escalate to his or her manager. Your manager's job is to provide you with this information in an actionable and predictable fashion, especially at lower levels. Make it clear that you want to get promoted on some timeline and ask for a specific plan ("improve delivery" isn't specific).

If that doesn't resolve it, I think trying to change teams (or even companies) is reasonable. I don't know how easy that is at your company but where I am at "my manager is unable to support my career goals effectively" is an absolutely reasonable and respected reason to switch teams.

Your manager is not doing a great job here. That's a fine thing to recognize. But I don't see why working with somebody to have them commit to something and hold them accountable is childish? That sounds like perfectly rational and healthy work interactions. Most of my human-to-human interaction at work is spent setting expectations, getting commitments (or committing to something) and following up on those commitments.

Thanks for the good points. I am actually not opposed to healthy discussion and clearly outlining goals. It's great to come to specifics where both parties agree on the goal.

What's childish is discussing "specifics" which turn out not to be and now I have to ask my manager, "Why did I kill myself to do what you asked?". This is reneging on goal itself and not the means.

Now, every 1:1 I have to hand hold this manager and make them say out loud how my work satisfies his own bullshit criteria and remind him of the goals.

I chuckle because this is how I've seen parents deal with 3 yr olds.

Set up a 1-on-1 with the director to discuss your managers behavior?

Not something to be done lightly, if you are already planning to jump ship it can hardly hurt.

Well, you can be a bit more diplomatic: set up the 1:1 to ask for advice getting that promotion, and as a convenient side effect your manager's lack of support will get mentioned along the way.

This is the way. The messaging and positioning work to your favor here -- the skip level will be happy to see a high performer in their report chain attempting to grow, and clearly, your direct manager would only want to enable that, yes? It's only a fair and reasonable expectation.

Don’t do this. You will just expose the wound and ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company (going above chain of command).

Find another job.

Well, what I think you're getting at is this kind of a tactic is inherently escalatory. But the truth is, if you want to get what you want, you need to be willing to play hardball and apply leverage. Of course, the most important part of that is BATNA, which coincides with what you said -- find another job.

Where I disagree with you is that it will ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company. Going "above the chain of command" is actually pretty normal and institutionalized process at functional companies -- it's called the skip-level meeting, and it's a deliberate check/feedback mechanism on line managers over-extending on managing upwards rather than downwards.

I'd actually argue the opposite point, which is that organizations that fail to properly implement skip-level meetings are missing out on an important mechanism which ensures the chain of command is performant and rooting out structural rot. As a spot check, my observations on every org I've worked at basically vindicate this.

So let’s reframe this. If you and your girl/guy have a relationship problem, and he/she goes to another man/woman to counsel, quite frankly, I’d never look at them the same again.

Life is not perfect because humans are involved. People will take it some way.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I bypassed chain of command and it went exactly as you’d expect. If you are my girl, don’t cry on another man’s shoulder. These are stories of old.

I don’t know, if this was a Stackoverflow question, which would be the best answer? Given how complicated life is, I’d wager my answer with a 50% probability, along with yours, is as close as we’ll get to a ‘best answer’, assuming we follow the spirit of the developer community.

I think you're proving my point unintentionally. If you're at the point where the relationship isn't working out, it's actually in everyone's best interest for you to break up and date other people. If you were happy, you wouldn't be looking. You became unhappy because you were unfulfilled in the relationship, because what you were looking for was something the other person could not provide, or vice versa. What is the virtuous thing to do? Is it to silently stew and settle, or is it to ask for what you want, and if you don't get it and think you can find it elsewhere, leave to do so? The answer is obvious.

All the other stuff you mention about "never look[ing] at them the same again" is more related to your ego, sense of insecurity and lack of self awareness more than anything. Once you pare those away, the objective truth is incompatibility. It doesn't have to be emotional unless you let it.

So in the business use case, you don’t want to forgo the paycheck in light of this. It’s the same relationship dynamic, but in the romantic sense you gain nothing, but in the business sense you rack up cash and tenure at the job, all of which can be flipped going forward (two years at a job, versus one year at a job).

I guess that’s my point. If the relationship is fucked in a pure romantic relationship, you must move on. If the relationship is fucked in the business sense, there is still value in timing your exit.

But if we turn to idealism at any point, we lose our tactical options (eg, I shall speak to the manager of my manager, and the world shall see how right I am). It can be folly.

The survival instinct is not lauded enough. It can take you further if you shift to it, in the worst of situations.

There's a difference between survival instinct and learned helplessness and antagonism.

In a healthy organization, skip-level interactions are institutionalized as a feedback mechanism against mid-level managers presenting an oversanitized version of what's really happening to skips when from the skip's point of view, there could be ticking time bombs and they'd like to know. In fact, if there's discord between a manager and a report, it's often a great opportunity for a coachable moment between the manager and the skip -- a line manager who doesn't learn how to handle these situations with diplomacy, candor, tenderness and efficacy will struggle to earn influence in their desire to become a manager of managers. And that becomes the skip's problem because it impedes their ability to grow an influential and growing organization.

It is only in a dysfunctional organization where a report talking to their skip is intrinsically adversarial to the line manager. Of course these situations aren't so rare as anyone would like (especially at stagnant big corporations), but it doesn't change the fact that if you work at such an organization, your career growth is pretty capped anyways and you may as well be looking for a new role regardless. Why?

Learning how to play petty political games doesn't actually level up your fungible skillsets and ability to deliver customer value. You'll start over from square one when you eventually do want to switch companies, and you'll never get that time back you wasted on merely "surviving" when you could have been actually growing. People shoot their entire careers in the foot by settling this way.

I guess at a place like Google, going above your manager makes sense. Like, where the fuck else are you going to go? It’s sort of only down from there, so certainly take the opportunity to maximize your career in that event.

We are not far off in thinking. Do what makes sense strategically. I’ll stand by the point it is pointless to do this kind of stuff at a bumble fuck Fortune 500 company. Know the battlefield, best of luck.

Yeah, I think we perhaps are violently agreeing with each other :) I /definitely/ agree with you that it's pointless to do this at an F500. Perhaps where my thinking comes from is that I've predominantly worked in startups, precisely to avoid this issue. That's not to say that startups prevent these issues -- far from it. Just that you get a different set of tools and a different environment that can often cut it out almost completely for a long period of time.

The reason I argue so vehemently against normalizing this kind of stuff (even if it is normal at F500s) is that it can create a level of learned helplessness. When I worked at such a company, it was absolutely everywhere. Despite the fact that folks were well paid, they had a list of grievances a mile long that made every waking hour at work absolutely miserable. But whenever I asked why they didn't just leave for greener pastures, the answer was along the lines of that learned helplessness -- survival instinct, etc. For me, the answer was simply "I can do better than this elsewhere. I will vote with my feet."

I think that sent a different message to the management chain, and I don't regret it.

Escalation is not bad. It is a perfectly serviceable way of making decisions and part of a manger-of-managers' job is to address escalations.

Ok so everyone is happy with your performance except your manager. Unfortunately they're the gateway between you and promotion at most companies. So whatever you're doing that you consider to be successful doesn't match their expectations. That's what you need to fix. Have they been sending signals that they want you to do x, but you think that y is more impactful? The fact that they seem evasive could just be down to the fact that it's hard for most people to give direct feedback.

The fact that you're killing it on "crud APIs" and they aren't impressed could be their way of giving feedback. If they aren't happy with that, ask them what else you should be spending your time on instead. If they aren't seeing you as taking a lead role because there are already seniors on a project, find a project without a senior and take ownership. People are always sending signals, they just might not be clear. The fact that you're so quick to dismiss them as bullshit here tells me that you're not picking up on them.

In any case it's worth initiating a conversation with them and asking directly what you can do to meet their expectations. And then follow up on that. I've seen so many cases where an IC thinks they're crushing it in ways that just don't matter to their manager and then wonder why they aren't being recognised.

Are you trying to tell me that I should ignore 9 months of discussing this, writing down "specifics" and them assigning me to work that clearly wouldn't lead me to a promotion as per themselves?

If you’re not happy, change jobs.

Their job is to advance company goals, hopefully that’s aligned with their best engineers growing as well, but someone has to CRUD their CRUD APIs and that someone was you on this project. It’s fair to ask what the promotion path/chances are (as you’re doing) and if those answers are not compatible with what you want, you change jobs. Their main job is not to give you work that will lead to your next promotion.

Cool. In that case, they can come and say that instead of waiting yeah? Why are they "working on it" for 9 months and wasting everyone's time? It's one thing to be direct and say that it's not possible for [insert reason]. It's another to be misleading.

If you’re progressing from “just out of college” to the level one above that of “basically competent engineer” (which in some companies is a different level and in others not), you have a case to make that you’re getting jerked around or there’s miscommunication at some link in the chain.

That’s a promotion where the company goals and your goals are perfectly aligned and you only have to show increasing technical competence and no crippling deficits elsewhere.

In many ways, it’s like getting from promoted from grade 3 to grade 4 in school. Do all the grade N work and you’ll progress to grade N+1.

If you’re making the case to go from a mid-level IC to a senior level, promotion is rarely about “nine_zeros hit all goals at a lower level” or “nine_zeros shipped at-level quality code on time at the direction of eleven_zeros who is at the higher level that nine wants to become”. That’s what full performance at your current level looks like. Performance at the higher level job is more about leading the project (or a big part of it), taking business strategy and turning it into your team’s technical goals and promotion into that level is supported by initial glimmers of evidence of doing that work, not (only) by strong performance at your current level.

You haven't answered my question. What's stopping the manager from saying [insert text from sokoloff] right off the bat? Why make me do other "specifics" and then renege?

I suspect it's incompetence in management but I'm happy to hear how you would defend such behavior.

I’m not defending their behavior, because I don’t even know what their what their behavior actually is. I’ve heard a small snapshot of it from not them.

I’m trying to help paint a picture of how the promotion process works in a lot of companies, especially for promotions other than the first one. I see it all the time in my own company. People, especially the talented and high-achieving types, seem to think promotions work one way (likely because they actually have worked that way all through their life up until that point) and are genuinely confused when they are faced with the first time they work under a different model.

“What do you mean I’m not being promoted?! I passed all the tests assigned to me in single-variable algebra!” That would never happen in school, but if it did, no one would explain “yes, but there was a teacher there providing guidance.”

“What do you mean I’m not being promoted to SWE3?! I demonstrated 9 months of mastery at SWE2 and hit all the goals assigned to me!” “Yes, but there was an SWE3 guiding you on that project.”

High achieving SWE2s often think that’s as ridiculous as the algebra example, while most managers and tenured SWE3s see them as obviously different.

It’s entirely possible that they’re screwing you over. When you ask for specifics, they offer, and you accept “better delivery” as an answer, effective communication did not happen. The specifics you reported above are exactly not specific.

For all I know, your opinion of your work is higher than theirs and they’re maliciously trying to keep you grinding away as long as possible.

Equally for all I know, they think there’s a couple things you need to shore up to be ready for the next level and you aren’t listening hard enough because you’re so focused on the prize that you’re debating them on every point they raise rather than reflecting on the 10-40% of what they say that’s dead right.

Equally for all I know, there’s a policy in the company that is blocking a promotion at your amount of tenure in role or something else.

The only thing I’m 100% sure is among you, your manager, and me, I’m the one who knows the absolute least about the situation.

The way to deal with evasive bullshittery is nail down expectations. Tell your manager you want to get promoted and need to know what they need to see by the next cycle to get you there. If they're still evasive, well, you have your answer on whether you should stick around or jump ship.

You're playing his game and he's winning.

Depending on your organization, you could switch to another team with more of a need for leadership or otherwise seems more likely to advocate for the promotion you're looking for. For some organizations, that's a big change, but other companies give a lot of autonomy to high performing individual contributors when it comes to picking what work (and therefore what team) they participate in.

> I prefer not jumping ship

And your manager knows it too, it seems.

If you aren’t sure you should stay, you should leave.

If you think it’s affecting your health, it’s a no brainier.

I'm curious what level you're at right now. I guess mid level?