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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

And what if no junior under a certain senior ever makes it past junior?

Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

Hinging senior evaluations on junior promotions directly fuels the title inflation I’m decrying. Desperate to show “impact through development,” seniors (or managers) push for premature title bumps; turning fresh juniors into “mids” or “seniors” without the skills to match, just to hit metrics.

This is rampant in tech, where inflated titles compensate for everything from low pay to talent wars, eroding expertise and making hiring a nightmare.

We end up with a system that prioritises optics over substance, where growth takes a backseat to checkbox promotions. It’s frustrating and counterproductive.

Mentorship should inspire organic development, not force-fed ladders that collapse under their own weight!

Instead, let’s measure seniors holistically, decoupling from junior title escalations to allow people to excel at their level indefinitely. Alternatives include:

* Technical Proficiency and Individual Contributions: Use code reviews, technical assessments, or metrics like deployment frequency and bug resolution rates to gauge a senior’s direct impact, without needing to “graduate” juniors.

This focuses on their own output and problem-solving prowess.

* Knowledge Sharing and Enablement: Track things like workshops led, documentation created, or peer feedback on guidance quality via 360 reviews—emphasising team uplift without mandatory promotions. * Project Outcomes and Efficiency: Evaluate based on team velocity improvements, innovation (e.g., patents or architectural wins), or overall delivery success, rewarding systemic contributions over individual mentee milestones. These methods honour diverse career paths, letting juniors stay put if it suits them while still valuing (and evaluating) senior leadership.

Agreed, a direct metric of “promotion rate” is obviously flawed. I posed it more as a rhetorical question for reflection- at the limit, it’s clear that people with mentoring responsibilities should be accountable somehow for being good mentors. Terrible mentors who undermine, sabotage, or consistently fail their mentees definitely exist.

A lot of the comments are complaining about how this metric is a terrible way to evaluate seniors but I'd disagree. If one junior can't grow then it's a problem for that junior. If no juniors can grow then it's a problem for the senior - either they don't have good mentoring skills OR they need to work on improving the hiring pipeline for their team (either raising the bar in interviews/changing what skills you're evaluating for in interviews/working with recruiters to fix the pre-interview filters).

In either case it's an ambiguous problem that needs to be solved and just throwing your hands up and saying that you don't want to be evaluated for that is not going to help.

> Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

Sounds like the same kind of mistake as evaluating teachers by the grades of their students. Soon people figure out the "one weird trick" how to get the highest score easily.

People perform to your metrics. If you don’t want people to be one trick ponies, you’d better have more than one metric.

I've never worked at a place like that, and I hope I never do. Although, I've never even heard of any reasonable person putting that into practice either, so I'm probably safe.

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