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> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

It's both.

You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.

The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.

> demonstrating performance at your boss's level

To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.

It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)

It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.

These are great clarifications.

And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.

I've seen a couple of patterns:

1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.

2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.

Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.

I really don't get this

> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted

If you're an engineering IC, and your boss is a manager with 4 other ICs, your boss's goals are twofold: get at least 5 ICs worth of results from the team, and managing people.

So to do what you and TFA suggest literally you can either:

- Do 5 ICs worth of work

- Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative

I've seen coworkers try to manage their peers, aiming for a promotion. To say the least it harms team unity.

I only managed to do the 2nd once when I was thrown into a project with an absentee manager and doubly-booked half-committed members who were actually happy for someone to organize the work. Those sorts of situations are rare. Or maybe that's the unstated qualification.

And: Do 5x the amount of work, well...

Maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough here, but I need some examples of how this is generally achievable. Maybe this was specifically _not_ about the IC-manager divide, and more like managers and manager-managers?

What I'd more generally expect is for a manager to explicitly put you in charge of a small, short term project with one or two other people and see how it goes: can everyone contribute, did you achieve results, were you transparent, how did you interact with the other members, etc.

This is a good question. I compressed too much: instead of "performance at your boss's level" I really meant, "helping to achieve your boss's goals".

If you're an engineering IC in a team of 5, what are your boss's goals? It's usually things like: hit your deadlines, avoid production bug catastrophes, and maybe add features that make the sales people happy.

How can your boss achieve those goals? I have a few ideas:

a) Processes: Introduce or refine processes for the team to ensure high-quality code or to gain efficiencies.

b) Mentoring: Help members of the team to function at their highest level.

c) Clearing Obstacles: Coordinate with other teams so they don't slow you down. E.g., make sure teams you depend on are on schedule, and if not, adapt and adjust.

But this is just an example. I think the easiest thing to do is ask your boss what their goals are. What does success look like to them? Once you know that, you might be able to come up with ways of helping that they might not have thought of.

This sounds like advice for how to be promoted to a specific level -- the first point where awareness of things beyond yourself is required (somewhere around the Senior or Staff level for ICs, depending on your company).

Generally everyone in a team should be working towards some shared goal, there's no level at which you can be a chaos agent and not serve some higher purpose. The difference at this level transition is that you realise that for yourself -- someone doesn't need to remind you of the goal and nudge you back on course. That same realisation is not going to cut it at higher levels.

For me the general version of this advice is not something you can just tell the person who's being promoted, it's collective advice, for them, their manager, their tech lead: everyone needs to agree that this person needs to be given more rope, they need to do something useful with that (i.e. not hang themselves with it), the people around them need to watch out for when they start tying a noose and help them untie it (already regretting this analogy), and that's how you get promoted.

The rope takes different forms for different levels. I'll use the level scale I'm familiar with, starting with a newly graduated engineer at L3:

- L3 -> L4. You help decide how to build the feature.

- L4 -> L5. You help decide what features are worth building, and are trusted to maintain them.

- L5 -> L6. You help shape the work and ongoing maintenance of ~10 people's work (what products are worth building and how), over a time horizon of 6 months to a year.

- L6 -> L7. ~50 people's work, 1-2 years.

- L7 -> L8. ~200 people's work, 2-5 years.

- L8 -> L9. Things start to get fuzzy. The pattern suggests that you have a hand in ~1000 people's work, which is possible to do in the moment, but rare. There's two ways I can think of: you're either a world expert in your field, or you have set the technical strategy well for your organisation as it grew to this size.

This is just based on my experience, working largely on infrastructure teams both in big tech and in start ups as both an IC and a manager (currently an IC).

Yes--excellent points.

I think at the higher levels (L8+) the job switches to creating a culture that can accomplish goals.

I think those are good examples. I think part of the confusion is that most of those are typical responsibilities of e.g. senior level IC work, so "performance at your boss's level" looks more or less the same as "performance at your current IC level".

Which is good advice! Do your job well!

I'd say it's about doing things at the next level to show you're ready for that level. So for moving from a Sr to a Staff position might involve doing more mentoring of the team, showing that you are using your knowledge to improve the efficiency of both your team and other teams, etc.

> Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative

Anecdotically, a coworken in my group started, on his own initiative, to “play manager” in out team, because he wanted to “help us all”. Of course he just wanted to ascend the ladder. That backfired instantly and spectacularly. I would never act with any authority if it was not very clearly delegated by my team, or my superior; and even then I would walk like in thin ice for the first 6 months

Agreed--that's a recipe for failure.

If you can't gain/keep the respect of your peers, you will not get promoted either (at least not at any company I would work for).

> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.

So technically, it is using your past experience to prove that you are operating at the next level

> Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.

This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.

How ridiculous the opposite sounds: You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level. You'd get laughed out of the room. But the company has this exact deal in reverse.

> > Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.

> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.

My current company used to work this way, but they moved to a "needs-based" promo process. You can be promoted to L5 if your manager can justify the need for an L5.

Which ends up making promotions significantly harder to come by. It's near impossible to justify the need for an L5 role when you already have L4s doing the work. No matter how far outside their level competencies a person works, that work becomes L4 work... because an L4 is successfully performing it.

It's a deeply silly and frustrating system.

I'm in this exact situation described in the two comments above. I explained to my manager that the project I have been working on has developed a lot since the last two years and if he would hire a replacement he would be looking at a senior person, not a junior. He agrees but he gets rejected when he made the case to his boss. My performance reviews have been above expectations. His boss claimed that it would not be fair to other people that stayed in the position for a similar amount of time before getting a promotion, essentially ignoring my exceptional performance.

Do you guys have any advice for this situation?

This depends a bit on your company’s structure.

My company, for e.g. is fairly flat, and my boss is more or less aware of everyone’s contributions in my team, he often works with them directly.

I also work with my report’s reports directly and am fairly aware of their work.

Despite this, some engineers, to my surprise, act as we have a strict hierarchy and try to reach to me through their managers.

From the sounds of your description, there are a few possibilities:

1. Your boss’s boss is aware of your work. She is also aware of others’ and she does not think that yours particularly stand out and she is willing to risk your departure. In this case, you would need to really look at this objectively. Are you really exceptional? Why does not she think so if that’s the case? Is there someone else who are also great (or giving that impression) that you are not aware?

2. She does not know you very well. If so, why is this the case? Does she not know anyone, or are you keeping your work to yourself? I’ve definitely been in this situation, despite architecting our whole core systems, years later I found nobody other than my fellow engineers knew. Was a hard-earned lesson for me, you need to start speaking about your work outside of your 1-1s, but not in a promotional way. By frequently offering your hard-earned wisdom where it is helpful.

3. She is not interested in knowing anyone. She will manage her team at a high level and she either won’t promote anyone until she is forced to (e.g. you are leaving otherwise), or when she is given a budget and asked for it, which she will then ask for recommendations, your chances than unlikely to be proportional to your work but be circumstantial. If this is the case, you should start interviewing.

Interview for another job.

Changing jobs every 2 years is the best way to increase your career long earnings.

People who do not move, signal that their market value is lower than the current compensation.

For extra money move right after a pay rise (so that you can negotiate higher salary)

This sounds like a recipe for the very best leaving. Do you see that pattern?

Its almost as if the definitions and expectations around titles are arbitrary and a song and dance around the value you bring/the current market rates

One thing that I've seen implemented to prevent that is to have the pay bands for level N and N+1 overlap. So in the time that you're doing "next level" work, you're expecting to be at the top of your current pay band, and then the promotion doesn't automatically give you a big pay raise, but it unlocks a pay band that you can go up in.

This works if performing at the top of your current level equates to performing at the bottom of the next level. That said, there's a problem where sometimes a "promotion" is really a new role, meaning to perform at the next level, you have to kind of not perform well at the current level.

It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job: 1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help) 2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates) 3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)

It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience

> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation.

It's a good deal if you deserve the promo. Giving someone the opportunity to take on projects at the next level and having them not deliver can be enormously expensive. The higher the level, the more expensive it is.

Possibly. It's the only way it actually works though, because of the Peter Priciple.

Imagine the other way - you have peopel dong a role, and the people who do the best job at that role get promoted to the next one. Some of them will be good and the new role, some of them won't. The ones who are good will carry on getting promoted. The ones who aren't will get stuck in that role. The problem is that everyone rises to a point at which they can't do the job, and every role is filled by someone who has been promoted one step too far.

In a healthy structure, it should be a halfway house - you shouldn't have to be doing the whole job that you're trying to get promoted to, you should be doing enough bits and pieces of it that you demonstrate that you CAN do it. That way the company has information that they're not promoting you to a position of incompetence.

I suppose it balances in the end, though. If you could make more money elsewhere you'd go elsewhere, so the whole reason you are willing to accept being underpaid through the transitionary phase is because you realize that you will be overpaid afterwards.

> You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level.

Did you just describe an academic scholarship?

How exactly do you suggest it should work, then? A timer starts and when it runs out you get promoted and everyone just hopes you didn't just get moved up above your level of competence?

That's true. I am out of the promotion game grind now. Personally, I have reached my ceiling and the time is better spent else where.

> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.

It can not be farther from the truth.

The best way to stay in the bottom is to work hard, to focus on work so that others have time to focus on advertising themselves, take credit of your good work and backstab you for everything else, befriend and lick the shoes strategically -even develop bed skills, for some- while you isolate yourself by sweating and believing everyone will understand or care about how you optimized that for loop.

Cynicism is a seductive drug. It makes you feel good because you don't have to do anything--the game is rigged, so why bother trying? But like all drugs it is ultimately self-sabotaging.

Careers are like love: you have to risk heartbreak or you'll never experience joy.

The keyword in what they wrote is "demonstrating". You do still need to advertise what you've done.

So basically you need to do a lot of bla bla bla bla ?>

I don't think there's a one size fits all here. If you don't go out of your comfort zone and "do more" you may never get a promotion because you're seen as average. But it's also true that if you work hard and constantly deliver you may still never get the promotion because you're seen as critical where you are.

You might be disappointed either way. Like any recipe, there are many ingredients needed to pull it off. Delivering results, solving your boss' or boss' boss problems, doing it visibly, having support from above, doing it at the right time, etc. all contribute.

1 is correct. You can't expect the person to get better when promoted, rather you move them to the job they are already (almost) doing

Ideally with increased autonomy and decision-making ability that makes them more effective.

This is premised on promotions and other work rewards having any kind of rational basis or connection to the work.

It could simply be that spending time with your boss makes them know and like you more, and people tend to reward people they know and like, making up some post hoc rationalization about performance or whatever to justify it.

No one wants to think of themselves like this, though, so they would never admit, even to themselves, that this is what's going on, but I suspect for most people it's the actual reality.

> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

> 2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.

That's not evidence for 1. At least you haven't explained a reason why it would be.

You have some mistakes stories to avoid ?

> if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it

lol