Item — HN Reader

Meh, it's been my experience that those charts are borderline worthless. The truth is promotions are probably only fractionally about performance. A lot of it is budget, creating pr/"buzz" [even if it's proportional to impact], did you happen to be on a revenue-generating team, is there any political risk to promoting you (e.g. would you say the type of things I'm saying right now?).

Maybe google or something is different (and I doubt it), but that's less than 1% of engineers.

1 comments

what makes the difference is:

- your boss is influential (politics)

- you are lucky enough to work on a high impact/ high visibility project

- you play yes man with your boss and please them

- how long have you been with the company and the political connections you have made

... quality plays a very small role in promotions ...

In all the organizations I have worked for, I expected a promotion within the first 2 years (to then leave on the 3rd anyway :) ).

When that did not happen, I simply left and got a salary increase and +1 level anyway.

If you are lucky enough to work in a high demand field (like tech) and you are good at it ... you are pretty much in control.

Qualified people that get s*t done are always in high demand, just make sure to always be on the top and keep sharpening your skills ;)

> you play yes man with your boss and please them

You need to be able to read this one. I've gotten a lot of props for being someone by bosses can rely on to challenge them. But I also don't do it for stupid things, and if they seem to not be willing to flinch then I back down.