Are Promotions BETTER Or WORSE Than The Tech Job Market?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

what is up it is Wednesday January 8th and I'm headed to the office um got a topic today from Reddit that I think is kind of interesting this one is if the promotion process is more broken than the hiring process which is definitely an interesting one I know uh a lot of what's being posted on social media for the past year two 3 years maybe um just more and more and more sort of Doom and Gloom around hiring um and I recognize that like there's a lot of um a lot of people going through challenges with like trying to whether it's switch jobs get their first job right like uh we got people talking about Ai and how that's going to be you know like why even be a software engineer anymore and it's displacing all of us like there's just a lot that seems

like it's stacking up against people for um for getting jobs right so you layer that in with like okay like what is the um not only like the application process with like flooding of of people applying to jobs but um the interview process right like okay so now you finally get selected for the interview but now you have to do the these ridiculous Elite code uh programming questions that are just like there to trick you and um or you get like crappy interviewers that are having a bad day and now you're kind of like rolling the dice to begin with to get the interview then you're rolling the dice to get a non- crappy interviewer like basically it's all against you and um so that's been you know a lot of what we're seeing and hearing online um you know you're watching this perhaps this

is uh sounds like experience that you've had right but this person who's posting this on Reddit is now kind of saying okay well historically for them uh there's a funny phrase it's kind of like uh you know like I said this in a video the other day the that your manager is the one that promotes you right but the the only other way to get promoted is when you promote yourself and that happens from uh from switching jobs right so this person's kind of saying like Okay look if um if we're interested in progressing in our career they're feeling like the promotion process is very broken um whether that's you know maybe in general or just from their experience at least uh from their experience of the companies they've worked at but what's what's more broken right the hiring process or promotion process um so

I thought that would be kind of of interesting to talk through um you know I have I have General thoughts on this if you're new to these videos a lot of these are just a stream of Consciousness me thinking through these things offering my perspective um if you don't know like uh because you're you're new around here um I am a principal engineering manager at Microsoft I worked in a startup for uh 8 years in digital forensics that uh shortly after I the ipoed so it was a quite a successful company um not my own startup but uh was very happy to have worked there from the beginning and um yeah so now I work at Microsoft for the past uh four and a half years uh in the Office 365 side of things so been an engineering manager for uh just over 12 years

now and uh love writing code outside of work so I have a bunch of different perspective um to share I'm not here to say that my perspective is the right perspective just something for you to kind of ponder and uh obviously uh ideally I'm helping sort of uh answer your questions and give you a little bit U I don't know guidance or you know uh alternate viewpoints to consider as you're navigating stuff in your career so um with that said if you want questions answered please just drop them in the comments I'm happy to go through I've been trying to answer as many as I can and then uh alternatively if you have something that you'd like to keep more Anonymous uh and potentially offer more detail just look for Dev leader on social media send me a message you can write whatever you'd like

there um within reason I suppose but I'm happy to keep that Anonymous and uh and try to answer as much as I can for you so um cool let's let's kind of think through this right so I think when we're talking about like what's more difficult I think the um the framing for this is probably like in terms of being able to um progress in your career right um I on the surface when I just kind of think about these two things uh my my gut wants to tell me that historically uh doing the job hopping thing is is the best way uh air quotes best way to get um you know promoted in advance in your career and um that is primarily based on the idea that you have more I guess like more you have more control in that sense right uh if

if you have more control than that kind of works so and historically I would say like when we're talking about people job hopping and stuff like what's happening is that people are saying hey look there's opportunities at other companies I'm going to apply so instead of waiting for the promotion I can kind of be proactive look for opportunities apply interview get the job um now where this gets a little bit murky at least a little bit murky is that if the dynamic right now for for job applications being so flooded is such that like that's not even the case right you might be like screw it I'm not waiting for a promotion I'm going to go look somewhere else and then you spend two years trying to apply to jobs like if that's I mean statistically if that's what's happening oh God what a terrible

layout on the road you can't see it there's construction there but they had um these metal big metal plates like an inch thick on the road but then they had like these like wooden wedges propping them up but I don't know if they like don't want you to drive on them or something like because of the way the wedges and stuff were cuz I feel like if I touched a wedge it's going to get knocked out from the plate but there's not enough space on the right side of the wedge and the um and the curb so like I either going to curb my wheels which I'm not doing in this car or any car or I'm hitting some wooden wedges uh so that was super awkward I don't know if I knocked over their wedges too bad um so yeah like are we are

we in this position now where we're no longer necessarily like in control of that opportunity and are you sort of you know if you were historically positioning yourself that way to say hey don't want to kind of wait for the promotions I'm going to be in control I'm going to go um you know think about my timelines and instead of saying focus on my manager conversations and like my promotion cycle I'm just like okay I'm at this level one year from now I'm going to be at this next level potentially at a different company maybe at the same company on a different team and then in your head you're just kind of picking the timeline you want and then using your um sort of ability to interview uh go through job applications and stuff um and kind of like force that into being reality um

and some people like do this right um I know like in general we'd probably call this like job hopping but um I've done you know videos on this stuff before I'm not necessarily saying that this kind of thing doesn't work or it's or it's good or bad um the the perspective I've kind of had on this is that if you you do this purely to only try and maximize like levels in your role um I think that that's dangerous like if you hyperfocus on it and the reason I'll keep this brief but the reason I say that is because eventually you reach some level and you're like I actually am not qualified uh for this position there's like dog hair in my mouth here um and then you're like okay so i' I've reached level whatever and like if you want to stop doing the

job hopping you're like okay but I I can't I can't actually perform at my job so I think that there is a sweet spot and you should consider what your valued you should consider like you know it is your career so I'm not saying like oh just don't do anything ever but if you're truly advancing like purely in levels on paper faster than your skills and experience are progressing you may reach a point where when it comes to your performance your performance is subpar based on the expectations um obviously if every job you have you're always like extremely overperforming you're probably underleveled so there's like I said I think there's a sweet spot so anyway I think there's you know groups of people that kind of think about their career this way where they're able to say no I'm in control of when this is

going to happen it's my time for the most part right and like I'm just not waiting for promotions and it sounds like the person who wrote this Reddit post is kind of saying like that's historically how they've thought about it um and what was a little bit interesting to me in this case was that I haven't really heard people saying it's because the promotion process is so broken um and I'm not saying that's like new insight I just for me like I haven't really heard heard people saying that so I think it's very interesting usually I think it's just because the way that I hear people talking about the job hopping part is like it's more of like a I'm in control of my destiny like you know I'm going to do this and you know I'm being proactive which I think is a is

a positive thing so that's cool um we have someone trying to sneak up behind me it looks like a low car but sometimes this kind of thing happens where people have some type of modified car or something and then they're like well I'm going to tailgate this guy cuz he's in a Mercedes but he's passing on the other side now so you can't see him what is that it is Alpha Romeo it's very low it's kind of weird um so I don't it's interesting like I don't I don't think that I disagree that like promotion processes are kind of uh they can be kind of broken and I think that one one thing that's really tricky right is like when we think about promotion processes sort of at the beginning of this video I said that you are promoted either by your manager or by

yourself by switching roles now in one of these cases there's a lot more in your control like I'm going to go apply for this job you might not get it but like I'm going to keep applying right like you're in control of doing the job applications the amount of volume um you know Skilling up in your interviews like a lot of those things are directly in your control now when it's like okay the other path is your manager is going to be the one promoting you I think if you have a good manager personally think if your manager is good then that actually does put a lot back in your control right your manager is like hey look I want you to get promoted I want you to be successful let's talk about the ways to make that happen now ultimately you need to own

your destiny here still but if I give you the right guidance if I point you in the right direction if you do good good things will happen and like they're kind of like as a you know good manager they're saying like if you do the things in this direction I feel confident that I can back you for promotion so let's be clear about what those things are let's move you in that direction you make it happen and I will do my part to try and put you up for promotion now a lot of people don't realize this or think about this but just because a manager wants to put you up for promotion does not mean that it's a guaranteed win right like I have had um the the last time that I had a conversation about being put up for promotion my manager did

put me up for promotion and I did not get it so it's not even like oh my manager so mean they're so bad they don't want me to get promoted in my case it was very much like my manager like cool we talked about all these things we have alignment I feel good about putting up for promotion and then it didn't go through so just as a heads up right this kind of stuff can look different at different places and just because you didn't get promoted does not mean that your manager didn't try obviously we have the situation as well but I just wanted to kind of call that out so the the tricky part with promotions here is like and sort of the the control part because I think for me a lot of this is like how much is in my control because

if I'm really hellbent on being like no I want to make sure that I'm progressing my career I want to do all the right things I want to see that I'm going up in levels in compensation and responsibility if it's not in your control you're kind of just like hoping you're in the right spot and for me that doesn't feel good so that's the kind of lens I'm thinking through this this uh this situation right promotion versus like uh external hiring or job transfer so on the manager side if you have a bad manager it's almost like it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in on that path right because you could be say look I'm doing all this good stuff um I did talk to my managers they said this is these are the expectations for the next level I'm doing it

I've been doing it um and then you got have a bad manager that's just like not progressing that whether that's uh you know recent conversation we had um what recent conversation we had I'm the one doing the talking it's not really a conversation I guess but in the recent video I did where someone had wrote in they were talking about their manager was kind of saying oh yeah yeah yeah we'll talk about your promotion we'll talk about it um but like not it's not how like uh we keep putting it off um like that's not a good spot to be in and that was for months so again when we think about how much control do I have here like I don't know that's not a really good spot to be in um and you can have managers that just like I mean at least

in that case the manager was willing to acknowledge the idea of promotion and it just like in my opinion there's something else going on behind the scenes that maybe was outside of their control and they were avoiding a promotion conversation because some external Factor but you could have managers that are like they don't even want to talk about career advancement or when they do they're not clear about anything so you're like I don't even know what I'm supposed to focus on like there's just genuinely bad managers out there unfortunately so when I think about all these different paths forward um I now it's kind of like in three categories and you can maybe kind of see my thought process evolving here one is like you do the external job applications and I should maybe even break that into two the job application part could be

internal team transfers because maybe you love the company you're at right like Microsoft is a huge company so just for for my example if for some reason I was like hey I don't feel good working under my manager which is not true I feel very supported for my manager and my skip but if I felt that way maybe I'm like hey I love Microsoft but this team isn't for me and I want to make sure I'm progressing in my career I'm going to go look for other job applications sorry other job openings um and apply to those within Microsoft so that's one path the other path is like maybe you're like I don't care if it's Microsoft or not or whatever company you're at and you're like I want to go you know maybe maybe if I switch to another big tech company or just

like a startup or something I have uh maybe more responsibilities maybe better compensation Maybe I get in at a level that's higher and you're like those are all way better things so it's an external move so those are sort of two paths down this one big branch and then the other side of this really big branch is like okay it's like good or bad manager and that's kind of two paths on the first Branch I just described I feel like there's still a lot more in your control but the time Horizon is no longer potentially in your control based on the job market so I think that makes it kind of tricky um I don't know like um it's hard for me to say right now because I'm not applying to jobs uh and everything I'm seeing is very much like this is awful this

is awful um what I'll say like this is the only sort of data point I have for my own experience okay so I I'm not saying this is uh you know a sweeping statement or not when I was applying for Microsoft and like I applied to Google Microsoft Amazon Facebook um that was there was like a initial round of layoffs at a lot there was like just like companies like closing down because this was like at the beginning of um of the lockdown so this is like the first wave of like businesses just being like or screwed so like companies are shutting down started doing initial rounds of layoffs this is sort of before this really big uptick where everyone was working remotely and then a lot of these big bigger tech companies or you know companies that had technology that could be leveraged like

remotely um started really like you know doing well um or accelerating at least so during that phase there were people there was like almost like a a wave of people hitting the the open job market and I was like man like this is probably pretty awful time to be applying but um you know engineering manager so maybe my Situation's slightly different um and then that's the only sort of uh recent data point I have for myself uh so it was it seemed like there was a flood of people hitting the market um but I was still able to land interviews and stuff please don't try to merge into me you need to look where you're driving um I hate driving man so when I think about this for myself I'm like I actually don't know um I feel like I said I feel fortunate to

be in the spot that I'm in but I think that would be a really challenging decision and I think maybe how I would kind of uh prioritize that is like maybe a bit of a balance right so personally I am not I don't feel that I'm a good interviewer because I'm very nervous about it I understand how interviews work because I've had to do them for you know 12 plus years uh interviewing others but because I do not get a ton of practice for myself it would take me a really big ramp up period so the ACT this is going to sound kind of funny the activation energy for me to be like okay I'm going to start applying to places that activation energy is very high it's very very high um but I think if I was like okay I'm going to start doing

this I would need to ramp up and then I would have to invest a lot of time into that for myself so that's one thing I'd have to consider is like how much effort do I want to put into this and I think that's something that you might want to consider depending on on what it's like um but the other path like again I'm fortunate that I feel like I am supported by my manager um if I and okay let me say because I am supported by my manager um I feel like there's a lot in my control so I feel like I can make progress I feel like I can put in the effort uh I can have open conversations with my manager at least and be like hey I know we've been talking about this like do you feel like I'm on the

right track with it or do you need me to shift gears um whatever it needs to be like I feel like I can have those conversations and not that I've had to but I feel like if I needed to to get more clarity um and be like I want different pers additional perspective not necessarily just different like I feel like I could talk to my skip level and be like hi like these are my career goals like do you see this kind of fitting in and like and have an open conversation about that so because for me I feel extremely supported that way the the activation energy is much much lower so if my boss just as an example my boss came to me today and said I'm on the way to the office and I show up at the office and he's like hey

there's this really big thing that I need you to work on and I need you to pause what you're doing and I actually think this is a really good career opportunity and this is where I'd like you to focus your attention and and let's move in this direction I would trust him because I I I mean I have a lot of respect for him but I have trust because because of the respect and because conversations we've had I feel supported that he's not just like telling me to do random stuff that he's thinking about business and he's thinking about for me how I can progress so I can see that when we have conversations so for me to go okay new thing I need to reprioritize that's some you know discomfort that's change the nice thing is the activation energy for me at least is

still lower than like going to I don't know being frustrated by that and being like okay now I have to I want to go start applying to jobs and stuff the activation energy is just way lower if let's change this though if my manager was bad okay if my manager was bad and I didn't have good report with them you know I was starting to kind of lose trust maybe it started good and like over time I'm like I don't really think that I'm being supported in my role if we played out that same scenario it might be like okay look we've been talking about this kind of stuff for a while this is yet another switch like I feel like I'm being randomized I feel like we're not actually making progress towards the things you need me to see delivered to be able to

get promoted now you want one more thing what might happen in my head is like the activation energy um is much higher because I'm thinking way further ahead I'm like every time we do this it's like another six months of like so I might go okay I see what's happening here like this person is kind of suggesting to me that in terms of promotion conversations like I'm not even like we're still way further out than I'm hoping for maybe the activation energy to get motivated to go do that project is a lot different at that point so that's kind of I'm obviously these are contrived situations I'm just trying to like think through them out loud with you but that might be how I think about those things um this is another reason why when I talk about your working relationship with your manager like

I think that you can relieve a lot of sort of whether it's artificial stress or whatever um getting Clarity with your manager can go so far right sometimes we have these situations with our manager where we're like oh like they don't they don't support me or like I don't have uh I don't understand the expectations and like not that I'm Defending Your a manager that's doing this necessarily but like imagine if I if I came up to you and I said hey have you actually have you tried to have a conversation with your manager about this and you're like yeah and I said okay well when's the last time you did it and you're like uh and you're you're actually not even confident anymore but the last time you had the conversation or um or really if you if you have the conversation in the

first place so I I would wager and I know people don't want to admit it but I would wager there's actually a large number of people where like it's just not happening and like again I'm not defending the managers that aren't actively having these conversations but I'm also going to turn to you and say like hey look like it is your career right and the person that cares most about your career is you it will always be you so don't just like be passive like always try to be proactive about these things it's not about defending the managers that aren't having the conversations in the first place I'm just trying to remind you that you care the most don't forget that and have conversations be proactive okay so I think that doing that kind of thing and just keeping that is a a tool in

your tool belt and your care you switch teams right you have a new manager you're on the same team new manager comes in I'm not saying kiss ass what I'm saying is like make sure that you start establishing that you want to be having career conversations that you are looking for clarity that you're looking for aligned expectations because if you're not establishing that and you're just hoping it happens hope is not a good strategy it's arguably one of the worst unless you happen to be very lucky and luck I don't think is a strategy either so you might as well just try to be proactive on these things okay so that's my recommendation um if you want to have I don't know like a better time better opportunity around the promotion path I'm getting close to the office here some final thoughts that I want

to share on the promotion path um that make it kind of tricky it's like some things I really don't like that I see um when it comes to Promotions um is this idea and I I tell my teammates this like I you I do not do this um when people are like hey like there's this big project and I want you to deliver the project and like that's going to be the thing that gets you the promotion I hate this for a bunch of reasons but one reason in particular is if we take all of someone's Focus effort and attention and we put it onto one project and we say your promotion is tied to this um one of the last videos I did was around priorities changing so what happens when you make someone's entire identity around promotion one project and then inevitably because

it's going to happen at some point I've seen this too many times we go oh priorities changed that really big important project is actually not at the top of the priority list so what does that mean for the person who was like everything about this project is my promotion are you just telling them like guess what no promotion because you just remove the thing that was entirely defining their promotion I don't like it um what I like to do is when I talk about promotions and projects I like to highlight the things that we're trying to demonstrate for promotion so we have talent guides or like a rubric if you're not familiar with with what a rubric is because I I realize there's a you know wide range of audience um if you're not familiar with a rubric it's a table that calls out like

expectations um across levels and things like that so that you can kind of uh gauge and have something that's a little bit more tangible um but we use like a rubric and I can go through and say hey look like we need to work on cross team stuff we need to work on making sure you have more design dogs like these are things that I need you to focus on then what I love to do is say this project actually gives you opportunities across these right these are like I'm I'm saying these are the things you need to work on these are the things I want you to focus on this project highlights these now that means if the project has to change or priorities change it's not that the new priority isn't going to help work towards promotion we just go back and do

the same exercise okay so there's this other priority that comes up can we talk about how this other project starts to highlight these things is there a direct overlap are there different things that we're now kind of focusing on can those still help towards promotion so it's not it's not the project itself that is the promotion it is the the things that the project can help highlight um now what I would hope for in either case because impact is very important when it comes to Promotions is that hopefully I can still find projects that are of of high impact and if you think about it if we just reprioritized something and we said hey that thing that was high impact no longer going to be a priority you would really hope that the thing that's a higher priority is also high impact so that's something

that I have to make sure that I'm communicating and working on with my team that's one thing I really don't like um and just as a brief note because I am pulling into the office parking a lot here um the other thing that I really don't like and I kind of get it but like I just hate how it's done uh and this is sort of me being still feeling new in big Tech but I don't like this idea of like visibility because to me that becomes entirely politics so um I in my career before Microsoft I have never had to even have a conversation about visibility I've never had to be in a situation where I'm like doing everything that I'm supposed to be doing and then and then we talk about promotions and it's like oh but there's not enough visibility in my

head I'm going like if this stuff's important it better be visible to the right people because if it's not it's obviously not that important right maybe I'm doing the wrong things so I don't like the idea of visibility this way um I realize there's probably people that are very seasoned in big Tech that are like oh you're looking at it the wrong way or there's different ways to approach this my point is that the the more effort I have to put into visibility the less capacity I have for focusing on actual software engineering so which one do you want CU I know which one I want and it really sucks to have to dedicate energy to something that doesn't feel like it's directly affecting like my my output so that's a personal opinion kind of frustrates me um I don't think that's necessarily a big

Tech thing but I I see that in big Tech so just something I wanted to highlight so for me at my level that's probably the biggest barrier is making sure that I have sufficient visibility because when it comes to the actual work and getting stuff done I'm like I love to work I'm going to get stuff done how do I make sure I have the visibility um so that's why I was saying you know with my manager I actually feel very supported that way because he's very aware of that and when we talk about opportunities for promotion that's something that comes up so uh anyway I'm at the office I hope that's helpful kind of thought process through like uh maybe switching for pro uh for you know kind of forcing the promotion or staying somewhere um but yeah not not necessarily recommendations any which

way just kind of how I think through that so hope that helps for some perspective I'll see you next time