I think the key takeaway is to never believe when someone says "Don't worry, you'll get promoted in no time".
Send this to the employer. If they balk you know know they were just telling you what you wanted to hear. Be wary.
There's no such thing as putting a promise of a quick-promotion into writing. No company would agree to that, nor should they (what if you suck once you start?). And I'm highly skeptical a company will agree to a milestones-rewards plan for an individual employee.
If someone wrote such a proposal and sent it to me, I'd immediately reject them in the hiring pipeline. And I consider myself to be a very employee-friendly hiring manager.
So, in this scenario:
* hiring manager tells the candidate they’ll get a “quick promotion”, but only if they “don’t suck”.
* candidate responds with proposed clarifications of “speedy” and “suck”.
* hiring manager drops candidate from consideration.
Did I get this right?
> And I'm highly skeptical a company will agree to a milestones-rewards plan for an individual employee.
And yet hiring managers play fast and loose with employee expectations all the time, even if their company would never honor such promises as a matter of policy.
How would you propose a candidate determine whether the hiring manager is making promises in good faith?
One of the worst offenses is the one we're discussing in this thread: a HM or recruiter says "We're slotting you at level 4 instead of level 5, because we like to give employees room to grow." That's a BS line -- put me in at 5 and grow me to 6, then! If you hear this line, you just need to understand it's poppycock and make a decision from there.
But basically everything a hiring manager says about a position can turn out to be just wishful thinking on their part:
* The team is most likely not solving a big problem
* The company most likely does not work well together
* The position problem does not have huge room to grow
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.
If they can't come up with tangible points, don't do the work. You are not risking anything because at this point, the manager has already decided they want to string you along.
"All the work you do, every bit of it, plays into your promotion. I ask you to do something because it's important to the company and to us all as a team, not because it's going to specifically help you get promoted. If you deliver strong results, I will be the first to champion your promotion. But if all you care about is promotion, maybe you should start looking elsewhere."
I mean, it's perfectly fine (and expected) that I should be discussing with my direct reports how their work helps them on path to promotion. But it's not acceptable for that discussion to be a blocking question for every work item.
Manager: I got this PagerDuty alert about the RefactoredRubeGoldberg System, can you look into it?
Report: Sure, how will this help me get promoted?
Manager: If you don't do this, then you won't get promoted.
You should periodically bring this up to your manager in the 1:1 meetings when you go over your projects that you are working on.
In a different world, I would agree with you 100%. But our industry is filled with managers who only look out for themselves.
For a manager who says "If you don't do this, then you won't get promoted", this is a bad faith power move. I have learned that when a manager says this and the IC acquiesces, the manager ends up with a proverbial upper hand. Often, this asymmetry is abused.
At that point, I highly recommend the IC to cut their losses and switch. Let the manager spend another 6-12 months staffing and ramping up someone else to do the work.