For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.
Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.
The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.
It's true that you need to understand the motivations of people in charge and align your output with that.
However, these overly reductive approaches to the workplace can easily backfire. A lot of the go-getter juniors I've had to work with in my career approached the workplace like a game of 4D chess to unlock, where they just need to identify what matters to their skip level boss and hyperfocus on that. Some times it works for a little while, but in my experience many employees underestimate how blatantly obvious these games are to any experienced manager.
From a management perspective, you can notice when someone is a hyper-responder to perceived incentives and trying to people-please you into rewarding them. Good managers learn to be careful about what's said, even in passing, and to carefully call out the behaviors they want to see to keep them on track.
Evil managers see this incentive-reward hyper response and use it against the employee. I've worked with some managers who will spot these go-getters early and then dangle carrots in front of them every time they want to get something done. The employee will chase every carrot aggressively, thinking it's their ticket to getting ahead. In reality, the manager isn't interested in promoting them out of that role because they can so reliably extract extra work by dangling another carrot.
When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary. I went to my manager and asked for a raise. He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond, but my manager simply set me up for failure. I don't think it was intentional, but rather that he's incompetent, because it's a pattern that I tell him to do X, he says that X doesn't make sense, one year later we go back to X.
Now my strategy is to slack off as much as I can. The company is comically dysfunctional, so the end result is that I have a livable wage for effectively two hours of work a day. The rest of the time I'm at home.
I have a go-getter in my team but they also got disillusioned when they fulfilled the promotion requirements but then the requirements changed. This means we're slowly building a team of lazy fucks, contributing to the overall rot in the company. Which honestly isn't a bad deal from my perspective when you think about it.
I used the extra time to start a consulting business and 3X my salary. When I was finally laid off a few years later, I just laughed and continued with my already successful consulting career.
The company was so dysfunctional, nobody really knew what I was doing. When asked, I would just say I was "really busy"/mention some technical stuff I was working on and I would always answer questions immediately from co-workers and management on Teams, to give everyone the idea that I Was still working hard.
What got me in the end was a new VP was hired and looked at the yearly budget. He started questioning why he really needed me and I was gone.
"When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary."
Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more? Your co-worker might have had more experience than you.
One time, an excel spreadsheet with salaries was leaked at work and I learned I was paid 50% higher than a co-worker in the same position. Multiple things determined this: I had more experience/education and I was better at negotiating my salary when I was hired.
"He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond,"
I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
> Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more?
I'm not. But the company isn't worth to me much either. So we're stuck in a situation where I do shit job and they pay me shit money, and that's their business model.
> I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
This is why employees who aren't lazy fucks like me jump ship every two years in order to maximize their income, because getting any raise whatsoever requires disproportionate amount of effort, which means that the whole model promotes keeping shit developers instead of good ones.
I'm not claiming I'm a good developer. Maybe I don't deserve to earn 2x. I'm just claiming that the company is dysfunctional because there's a self-correcting mechanism in place that promotes incompetence and laziness, and I'm acting as designed per the mechanism.
The author deals with the question of the advice recipient's goals near the start of the piece:
> For some people it means finding work they love. For others it’s about meaning. For many it’s just getting promoted. Still, here’s what I usually say.
The rest of the piece does sound like corporate ladder-climber advice. For example:
> [...] and people notice. That’s enough for a while. But eventually it’s not. Everyone around you is technically strong too. So for most of us, you won’t stand out anymore. You need to increase your impact in other ways. [...]
Where, to a ladder-climber, "impact" is corporate euphemism for recognition and promotion ("people notice" and "stand[ing] out").
And common corporate getting-recognition advice:
> And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.
And even the closing words could be constructive advice for ladder-climbers:
> And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
But it could also be applicable to the rare/mythical unicorns who just want to do good work within a corporate environment.
That is, getting promoted is partly it, and partly explicitly not.
Will this actually prevent me from getting promoted? :(
Maybe I should look into some speech therapy but not exactly sure how effective that is past a certain age.
I don't know if you have a stutter as well, but I've had stuttering therapy again recently, it's not very age related. Happy to send you resources. Feel free to email me.
People in charge of promotions often have more than one choice for a given promotion and they will use any criteria they can to weigh for or against you
A speech impediment is more likely to weigh against you than for you, unfortunately
That's the sort of thing that anti discrimination laws and guidelines are supposed to remedy but I suspect they mostly don't actually fix
Personally, if speech therapy is an option I think I would try it? It can't hurt you any
I'm going deaf, and looking into fixes for that. I don't think you should be ashamed of your speech impediment, but I also don't think you should be ashamed for looking into help fixing your impediment either
Their is also an effect that I have seen many times and experienced myself. Where it’s evident that someone has an idiosyncratic challenge, but you can tell they have put effort into overcoming or mitigating it. And they just work through it, not letting it get in their way.
It demonstrates life competence, and is a real positive.
Whatever you do, whatever you can do, don’t let “it” get in your way.
I'm not talking about people who can't express themselves or can't understand, merely that they haven't mastered it - use clumsy wording, or have a thick accent. These are often some of the most technically capable and talented people I've worked with, but also typically are not perceived as such by others, and im ashamed to say, working together with them would often result on the credit being placed unduly on myself.
I also saw a bunch of C-levels being total sociopaths but that's another story :)