First, the author is right. This is the way the world works, and if you want to get ahead, play the game. But I have strong contempt for management throwing up their hands and saying “it’s your promotion, own it”.
Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.
When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.
If you don't like your broadband provider; you change it. If you don't like a car brand; you don't buy it. You don't buy them and claim their deficiencies are unfair.
This could work if there is an accessible alternative that's better which there may not be.
Demanding change can also work, and regardless of whether better alternatives exist.
"Just move to a country where women can vote" was not an effective strategy, demanding the vote worked for a huge number of women without them even moving to the next town.
Yes, if there's only one employer in the entire country then you're stuck. If the context is a communist country I'm happy to modify the advice. Except even then it's still "leave the employer and go somewhere else".
Not just more than one employer, but some healthy number of available options.
You thought A is great but you think you can find better so you go to B. They turned out worse, you then tried C and those weren't great either. But now A won't hire you back because they already filled the position, and there are no other available companies doing the thing you want to do. Now you're stuck with inferior employment options compared to the choice of not changing jobs in the first place, unless you're willing to do something else entirely or start your own business.
Depends on the field obviously, but there are reasons why people might want to stick with a not-so-bad job instead of looking for a perfect one.
Of course - and employers have the same issue with employees. We don't have perfect information, but having conversations with alternate employers' employees helps. Just try and find stuff out. It's not going to be perfect, but it's also hard to imagine a better system that can work in practice.
Former manager at big tech here and this is my experience, not sure it really translates to other companies.
Usually higher ups constrain line managers of ICs with limited budget (most of the time you don't know what it even is). Moreover, the process is inherently flawed: I may help folks find opportunities for impact and it may even be great impact in my eyes, but eventually higher ups want to just promote the really really good people, which will inevitably result in comparing everyone with everyone. Most of the time I was not in these conversations.
It's unfair because most people work against some goal that's agreed upon, and later that year the criteria changes.
This is to say, no one is really in full control in some companies. In 12 years, I have yet to find a process and surrounding environment that promotes fairness. When there's limited money and a true meritocracy is enforced, there's loss of control. Yet, managers should own the message of why you don't get promoted, even though you should in their eyes and there's no clear reason for the outcome (EDIT: other than "someone, somewhere was better than you" in some way which is very disempowering).
> It is not in their interest to promote you or give you a raise unless you ask for it.
In my "big tech" company, it's in the interest of my manager that reports are promoted. The question of promotion is discussed at every evaluation cycle (6 months). We usually decide of a plan with the manager to have the right signals to show for the next cycle.
Also, not mentioned in the article, but is it an heresy not wanting to be promoted? Actually, I just refused working on a promotion recently. Next level means more responsibilities, change of focus, more meetings, more pressure.
My best engineers don't want a promotion, but they wanted to be optimally and continuously rewarded both financially and with the ability to be able to decline non-meaningful or low-interest tasks. As Gary Tan's quote said: learn or earn, but better: both. A good engineer should be getting that.
Not wanting to be promoted is fine, but it does come at a cost because along with that extra responsibility you may also be sacrificing influence over the things you do care about. You can still have that influence through other ways, but it takes work and may involve all the things you were trying to avoid by not getting promoted.
N.B. I’m not saying that higher up ICs influence things by coming in and saying, “I am an IC6 and I think we should do it this way,” but they often have more opportunities to have the right conversations, and have hopefully learned good influencing skills along with technical skills.
The Tech industry can be a stormy sea, so I'd like to share a few seawomanship advice to my fellow young and younger women software engineers. In this first part, I talk about performance and promotions, and how to be the captain of your own career. All aboard!
> In a for-profit organization, the optimal behavior for the company is to employ workers at the lowest pay that the worker is willing to accept.
I've been around the block enough times to know this, but I still hate it. Why do we give so much of our only lives to this system?
> So there is no incentive for a manager to promote you or give you a raise unless you ask for it.
Even if you do, theres still no incentive. The only incentive is threatening to leave when the cost to the org of your doing so is greater than the cost of promotion.
Couple of points:
1. The above are why (after 30 years as a dev) I'm trying to build something on my own. But its hard.
2. I'm not a woman, but the points above aren't really gender-specific. I do appreciate the substantial additional challenges faced by women in tech, though.
The notion of these regimented promotions is ridiculous. The only reason anyone should be "promoted" is for generating value and the potential to generate even more value in their next position. This whole expecting a promotion, and employment in general, is not very dignified. No one should be promoted at all unless they are gunning for it.
That is excellent advice but the article doesn’t explain why this should apply more for females, and that is crucial.
As a male that scores higher in the agreeability personality metric than the average female and that females average much higher in that metric than males cross-culturally I am in a unique position to reflect on this. People that measure higher in agreeability do worse at administering their own needs even after they are aware of what needs to be done, so career elevation then becomes a self-reflection challenge as much as an administrative challenge.
As a point of consideration think about why/how the military does a much better job of retaining and promoting females than does the tech industry despite it being a far more masculine environment. One reason is that the military strongly advocates the administrative guidance in the article over and over again. Secondly, there is a deliberate process for promotion in the military that requires completion of education at each level and a minimal time in grade. There is no mystery or social mastery to the process.
Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.
When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.