Well at least they tried. I'm in a Fortune 500 with no IC/TC promotion path that spams the entire company with promotion announcements that land like insults every week.
I see those all the time too well knowing that for me that for me any further promotion is close to impossible.
One thing that happened a few years ago was that I was on an improvement project that supposedly saved the company millions of dollars. At the end we won an award and i received an email talking about a big party at headquarters with great entertainment and good food where people could mingle with top management and the board of directors. It described what fantastic opportunity this would be. This went on for paragraphs.
Then the last paragraph said something like “by the way to save money we will send only the project lead and your management (who had nothing to do with the project) to the event but you will also get a nice plaque instead of the $500 or so gift card that used to be normal for this type of award. “. I still don’t know how anyone could write this and not see how crazy it was.
Anyways this was a good reminder to look after myself and not be a “team player”.
It's way better than the secret promotions that happened where I used to work (a fortune 500 company). The levels were spaced much farther apart than FAANG and when someone did get promoted you'd only find out if they decided to make a change to their email signature.
Reminds of a job where they would wait until the last day to announce someone was quitting. Management required the resigning employee to keep quiet. So hand-over then became a mad-dash for all involved.
I'd prefer that. We're big enough that there are nice promotions every week upgrading marketing/sales and M&A people into upper management. The last (last as in terminal, final) time I privately asked about promotion pathways all it got me was the manager's ridicule in a later engrg department meeting.
