Preparing for Promotions Ahead of Time

Reference

• Why? Perform at next level. Impact at the next level. Business need and business case. Raise the bar at next level.
• In practice: Perceived impact. Support from others. Internal politics.
• Heavyweight promotion process with the goal of reducing bias: usually has a paperwork-heavy process.
• Promotions at big tech:
  • Pay for performance.
  • How? Software engineering, design/architecture, execution/results, collaboration, creating efficiency.
• Promotion-driven development:
  • Unfortunate consequence of the impact-drive nature of promotions and performance reviews at Big Tech.
  • Engineers will typically write their own, in-house solution, and justify edge cases where existing solutions don’t work well enough.
  • There is little to no incentive for any engineer to go with an off-the-shelf vendor solution that solves the problem. This is why there are 20 different chat products in Google. Reference
• Advice:
  • Self-evaluate.
  • Produce work day-by-day.
  • Organise things that help with getting things done.
  • Publish your work, promoting it to others.
  • Keep track of achievements.