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Comment by cephei | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, I've seen engineers try to take on more work to get promoted, but the key issue is that they were doing more work at their own level instead of focusing on work that would be their responsibility if they promoted. If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.

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> If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.

This is one reason it's critically important for a company to have paths for ICs to take on larger responsibilities that aren't necessarily management responsibilities. Not everyone wants to be a manager, and not everyone is good at being a manager. Some people want to become increasingly senior engineers. (They'll still, ultimately, be responsible for things that involve other people, but that doesn't mean they want to be a people-manager.)

"No bastard ever got promoted by doing a lot of work for the company. He got promoted by getting someone else to do a lot of work for the company."

- General George S. Patton, probably

Great point. And I think this is why I love the framing in the OP.

“Do more” is a failure mode and path to burnout. “Do what I’m doing and you’re not doing” is a cue that an ambitious engineer can reflect on constantly.

That's also pointing to a big risk for certain jumps, as everything done in the list for, say, a cross team position means less work on your team. So a manager that isn't all that friendly can use an attempt at promotion as a great excuse for a PIP: I've seen that done around me at least a couple of times.

Yep, as a manager, I am explaining this conundrum often. You can be a rockstar SDE 2 or senior, but not be ready for a promotion because you aren’t leading enough.

"promotion" is just a word. Either management can pay for performance, or employ can perform for pay, and cut back on work hours.

If they do that, that's exactly why you don't want to promote them because it is clear they don't understand that doing x+5 work on your own is not as good as x*5 when you become multiplier by helping others.

Except the only way to do x*5 work is by your team hiring extra 5 people for you to manage... or, somewhat uniquely to our industry, through automating your own work.

Also, everyone else hears the same memes about "being a force multiplier" too. When everyone is trying to be a multiplier for the team by helping everyone else on it, the result isn't exponential productivity growth - it's drowning in exponential noise.

Like some other commenters correctly observed, the most significant factor is actually whether the company you're in is stable headcount-wise, or growing fast. In a stable company, promos are a contested resource, which makes the requirements arbitrary - you're graded on an ordinal scale, not a nominal one. In a fast-growing company, promos will happen to you, through no effort on your own - you can coast upwards on seniority alone.

In neither situation, consistently performing at the level above you is a differentiating factor.

x+5 is greater than x*5, if x=1. But great thinking, just make sure you're transparent with your team members so you neither get x+5, nor x*5.

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