No Support System, No Promotion: A Candid Reflection

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Hey folks, I am headed to the office. It's Wednesday. Um, I was going to do a slightly different topic today. Um, let's get that turned off. Not that it makes a difference. It's going to beep in just a second. Uh, I'm going to talk about myself a little bit. I'm going to talk about career paths, trajectories, stuff like that. Um, and this is it's relevant. Better stop. Look both ways, buddy. Um, it's relevant because I had an employee ask me about this kind of stuff in a 101 uh this week and I was elaborating on like different levels for software engineering and what career progression looks like, different things to focus on and um was kind of highlighting that like things get a little bit more complicated or less straightforward I guess is a way that I would say that uh as as your senior ority is increasing and um there's aspects of that that I don't really like.

Um and I realize that this kind of stuff will be different to different places, but I wanted to talk about this from I don't know like a information sharing perspective kind of like share my perspective, my experience without it being a rant. Um because I think that this kind of thing is easy to talk about with uh or let me say the other way. I think it's hard to talk about without without ranting. So, I want to challenge myself to to share the experience and the perspective without it becoming a rant, which uh you might already be noticing that uh I'm I'm trying to like collect my thoughts a little bit more as I'm speaking because like I said, it's easy to start going off the rails on this kind of stuff and being like, "Oh, well, I don't like this and this is crappy." in um I mean it's a vlog and it's a stream of consciousness so it might happen a little bit but I don't want it to in this video.

That's not my goal because sometimes when that happens um I've done a couple of rant videos. There's actually one that I have that's recorded and uh the second half of it turns into a complete rant and what I finished and got out of the car I was like I want to toss um the entire second half of that video out because like I'm not like I'm not proud of it almost. It's not that I said anything that I'm like oh I regret that. But I'm like just I don't know like I don't it doesn't feel good. I think it felt I think in the moment it might have felt good but then once I had it out of my system I'm like I don't feel good about it. Um, so the the short version of this entire video is that in my uh 15-year career so far, approximately 15 years, I have never been officially promoted, which is a which is an interesting statement.

Um, doesn't mean that my level's not increased. It doesn't mean my role hasn't changed. Uh, I've never been officially promoted. And what I mean by that is I've never sat down with my manager at any point in my career and been presented a promotion. The closest thing to that would be when I started managing um would be the closest thing. But even that is not quite um an official promotion because it was so early in a startup that there was no real structure for it. But maybe we can count that one. So, I'm going to give you a little bit of history and then talk about um talk about kind of like where I'm at in big tech at my level as a principal engineering manager. Uh for context, uh for those of you that are familiar with like the numeric system at Microsoft, that's a level 65.

And uh and I've been at Microsoft for just under 5 years, and I've not I've not been promoted. Um, but we'll get to that. So, again, it's not a rant. I'm not here to complain. I'm here to kind of share the perspective on on what it looks like as I go through this stuff. So, before Microsoft, and a lot of you, if you've watched other videos, you already know this, I worked at a digital forensics company. Uh, was a startup when I started there. It was like seven or eight people. Um, was hired on as a developer fresh out of uh, university. And uh a few months in they kind of made me like essentially a manager, right? Team lead was what they called it. But I had full comp view. I had at one point I had like 13 direct reports. It's just like nuts.

Um but yeah, like for for all intents and purposes, I was a manager, right? Um I think that like when and when I say that like one-on ones, I have career conversations. I'm literally in a position where I can affect people's uh compensation and rewards like it's it's a manager. The con extra context there is like we didn't even have a senior developer role for like for a while. Um and then once we introduced that we didn't even have other roles above that. So very much like startup kind of things where it's like we're just figuring stuff out as we go. So that initial conversation uh where they said hey like are you interested in in leading the teams uh was kind of like arguably the first type of promotion at this point in time because that would have been like 13 years ago. I know I said 15 years of experience.

I had two full years of internships before graduating. So I count that as working experience. Um, if you don't then 13, whatever, call it whatever you want. But the idea being that 13 years ago, I can't really remember if when I was presented the the team lead kind of situation to start leading teams if I was sat down and got like, "Oh, buddy, come on. We're going to miss this whole light." What an absolute Oh, don't have the 360 camera going. This guy was in the left turn lane, waited until the light almost ended, and then decided to go straight through the intersection instead of turning. Um, yeah, I can't recall in that conversation if I was presented with an actual official promotion. Don't know. Don't think so. Uh, just because I don't think anything was really official at that point in time. But at that company um like how things changed over time was that my you know every year my compensation went up.

There were times where I received stock bonuses. Uh there were times throughout the year where I might get a comp increase. Um there were times where I delivered on projects and received a cash bonus. Like I I feel like I was fairly compensated, right? And I went through a lot of my my career at that company never really thinking about titles at all. I never had to care because the the more I worked and the better work I did just like translated into into rewards. And like for me that was awesome, right? I was given autonomy. I was fairly compensated. Um why did I care what title I was given? where that started to matter for me personally and maybe before I say personally I started to notice that as the company was growing and people were coming on board there was a lot more questioning about like what does career progression look like in terms of levels.

Um but for me it really sunk in towards the end when it was like I had peers that I had literally hired. Um so managers that had come on board and uh they were being put into director positions but I I was unable to even get a director position because I was a technical manager which meant I was coding and managing teams and they had not established like a technical director role or anything. So there there was there was no role or no title above mine in my career path there. Again, this is just they hadn't built it yet. But as a result, I had peers going into director positions that could get promoted and I simply couldn't. And there were instances where I was doing uh and this isn't to be cocky or anything. This is literally out of necessity to keep the organization functioning where I was doing the role of like multiple engineering managers.

So it's it's not because I was doing a bad job. In fact was you know arguably quite the opposite but like there was just no role above me in order to to go there. So couldn't do it. Um, I did have a title change partway through which was when they actually assigned the technical manager title and I remember going in to have the conversation about that and I was like, "Congratulations, like here's your title." And I was like, "Awesome." Like, "Do my responsibilities change?" "Nope." "Uh, does my compensation change?" "Nope." "Okay, so you just you just renamed it to technical manager?" Yep. Okay. So, is that a promotion? I don't I don't think so. Again, maybe I'm being pedantic about it, but those eight years, there was no official promotion. And I'm not complaining about that because like I said, uh going through that period of my career didn't didn't matter to me, right?

I I had I had a pretty decent stake in the company. So I felt like uh you know I didn't own obviously not my company but it felt like the harder I work the more I can help the company be successful and I feel like my success is very much uh attached to that and it felt good right coming to Microsoft um is where and again we're talking about startup to big tech right so dramatically different uh I'm entering a company that's been around for uh for ages whereas the first one that I was at I was there for like almost since the very beginning. Um so again different environments. So I I enter Microsoft as a principal engineering manager at level 65. So for other people that have been at Microsoft they they work their way through their roles and they get promoted up to principal at level 65.

An entry level, just for context, an entry-level developer starting at Microsoft would be a level 59. I don't actually know why the numbers are the way they are, but 59 would be entry- level developer. Principal band starts at 65 at Microsoft. So, I I start there at level 65. Um the I had a manager change early on and you know, really really like my first manager is very supportive. Um so that was all great. uh when he switched teams, I had a period without a direct manager. But again, my skip level awesome. Um really awesome guy to work for, but there's a bit of a there's like a gap where I don't have like I don't know like direct support. And for me personally, I don't feel that like I need that to do my day job, right? Like you know, you set me in a direction, I'm good to to work my ass off, deliver everything I can.

uh I don't need I don't feel like I need that support in my day-to-day. But what I'm realizing now is that in order like at my level at 65 to get uh beyond that, you absolutely need uh support from your manager and it might not be so that you feel good about your work uh but a lot of it could be like specifically because you need visibility. So, I had this period of time where I did not have sort of this this extra support that I didn't know I needed, right? Um didn't have the support for visibility. Uh I ended up getting a new direct manager. She was awesome to work for. Uh but then I have and I've talked about this in other videos too cuz someone asked a question uh about having a new manager, what that looks like. And so there's this period where she's new.

she's not going to understand necessarily the the scope of the impact I'm having cuz she's new to the domain, which is totally fair. So, I spend my time working with her, building our working relationship, helping make sure she's ramped up. She did an amazing job. Um and then over that period of time there was a point where she said okay like uh you know she's doing what I feel like a manager should be doing for me which is hey like trying to work towards how you get promoted in your career and she worked with my skip level and what had happened was that I inherited a second team. So I I doubled my entire workload. I was hired on to manage one team and I inherited an entire second team. Now the state of the second team, not anyone on that team's fault, was uh basically in shambles.

And what I mean by that was that the previous manager was effectively strategically trying to reduce the team size for for other reasons. um and basically adjusting how things are geographically uh organized. And I I don't have enough context for why he was doing that originally. So, it's not fair for me to to criticize his approach, but all that I can do is criticize the sort of the outcome of that that I was handed, which was a very uh very bad setup geographically. Um it meant that I had teams in different geos that were disproportionate. Uh for example uh in the original setup to support on call I would permanently have two people on call which is impossible right? So automatically problem. So I spent the next while trying to make sure that I could operate these teams together given the state they were in.

And so back to what my manager had done, she'd worked with my skip level to make sure that uh I had something to focus on that would be visible and she said, "Hey, you focus on this. We feel like we have a pretty good case for promotion." Awesome. Great. Like I said, you give me a direction and move out of my way and I'm going to kick ass. So, I work on this deliver uh couple projects uh in addition to that. And my manager did put me up for promotion. So awesome, right? Like she had the evidence that she felt she needed enough evidence that my skip level would agree to that. But at my level, that's not sufficient. It's not sufficient for my manager to say I want to to promote. It's necessary, but not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient for my skip level to say I'm happy to to promote.

It needs to go beyond that. And essentially it goes to uh up to the CVP and there's uh I don't I don't actually know who to this day but there's a like sort of delegates or direct reports that will be part of a conversation around this. And essentially the first time that I went through this I was I was denied promotion uh and the the general feedback was basically the work that I'm doing does not have enough visibility. And this is like it's kind of hard feedback for me because um and again I'm not gonna try not to rant or anything. It's hard feedback for me because it's like um I I feel like I was doing the things that I was told to do, right? These are the important things. You should focus on these. And I did. And then that ended up being not visible enough.

So then the questions that come up for me are like, well, was I expected to be actively communicating this to different audiences or was this perhaps just not impactful enough work that it had visibility? Uh maybe it's a bit of all the above, maybe it's some other things. But it leaves me in a bit of a confused state because it's like, you know, if uh if my manager and skip level feel good about it, then why is it a surprise coming back that there's like not enough visibility, right? Like it's kind of a crappy feeling. Um so I said, "Okay, like I need to work on visibility." Um so I need to assume like maybe I shouldn't assume, maybe it's bad to do. uh want to assume that the work I'm doing is the right set of work, but uh I'm going to make sure that I am trying to uh solicit more feedback, especially from people that are higher up.

Um so I actually reached out to um essentially like my skip levels level and solicited feedback because I was working with uh this group engineering manager team and uh said, "Hey, like would you mind you know, being able to get feedback on things that I can work on because I do a lot of work with all of your individual teams. And uh this uh this group engineering manager is incredible. Um she actually she did reach out to every single one of her her direct reports that were managers got reviews from all of them that supported me and then she even in writing gave me her full support for uh promotion to the next level. Again, it's not it's not sufficient. It's not sufficient, but it is um like it would in my opinion it's necessary to have buyin from someone at her level. I don't even know if she's part of that conversation, but like it's more evidence to support, right?

This is visibility. Um she's aware of the work I'm doing across her teams and the impact that that has. But in my head, I'm like, "Okay, I got to start repeating this across teams." Now, if we fast forward a little bit, um like and I'm talking of like a couple of months after that happened, if not like less, I ended up switching teams um for, you know, won't get into the reasons necessarily, but I had this opportunity to switch teams and to me it was like kind of feels like a no-brainer to do it. Um, so I switched teams and uh and I had the conversation with my manager and my skip level and I told them very specifically that my, you know, opportunity sounds incredible. The work that we do on this team uh is super interesting to me. I think this is really great.

Uh, interesting projects. I said my biggest concern though is like I've been at this level for a few years now and I have been fighting for promotion working on visibility is one of the pieces of feedback and my concern is that I'm going to lose my progress because I'm switching teams. By the way, I forgot to to mention that when I had my new manager um on the previous team, we actually ended up getting a new skip level. So my entire chain of reporting up to the the CVP had changed entirely just for what it's worth. So I switched teams now um and my manager from basically day one was very good at saying like hey here's what I want you to focus on. These are your opportunities for visibility. Um and you know same with the skip. It's like uh and they're both great right?

They, in my opinion, they were doing the things that I would really want my leadership to do, which is like, I don't need my handheld in my day-to-day work. I will get done. I will do a good job, but it's like some of these things end up feeling like they're completely outside of my control. All that I can do is the work that I am told is the right thing to do, and then go kick ass at it. So the uh the the story is essentially like I focus on these things that are supposed to have high impact, high visibility and um and I believe that like the the situation has been that and I don't I obviously don't have the the specific details, right? Um I don't I don't know this for a fact. My understanding is that they they did attempt to get me promoted and um and then the feedback that came back was a no and now it's not around visibility necessarily.

It's around uh not demonstrating sufficient innovation uh which which is hard because now the uh it seems like the the marker has moved in terms of what to focus on. So, does that mean I've had sufficient visibility or does that mean that there hasn't been visibility into the things I've been innovating? Um, what what do I do? Right? So, this has made it really hard for me because I'm going in I'm about to have 5 years at Microsoft, right? And um it's 5 years at the same level. Uh five years of working my ass off trying to to do the right things. Um and then feel like in terms of career progression, it's it's not the right things. So, to give you another quick example, uh, in terms of like how how challenging this is for me personally, uh, I've, you know, for folks that have been watching my vlogs and stuff, you know that I've been talking about burnout for a few months now.

I'm working on a project that's incredibly taxing for me and, um, it's causing like a significant amount of burnout. This project in particular does not acrue to any innovation or any innovation that I can claim. So one of the reasons for taking on this project was like this is a really good opportunity for visibility, right? It's incredible. Um and again I'm super appreciative that my manager was like, "Hey, there's this opportunity. I need someone to do this." And I'm like, "Hell yeah, I'm your guy." right? This is what I need from a manager. Um so that's really cool. Um but as I work on this project, right, the feedback is that I am very good at uh executing. There's no question about me executing on things. People feel very good about that. Uh and this project is demonstrating that as well. So all all goodness. But the problem is that it doesn't acrue to any innovation.

or at least any claimable innovation on my part. It's not that we're not innovating, but I am not the one innovating. So, I end up investing a significant amount of time into making sure that I can coordinate this project, have groups deliver on it, right? To the to the point where like I'm doing meetings before work with people in Europe. sometimes meetings after work with people in China. Uh I've had an extra project kind of creep up over the last month. I've talked about this too. Um or I thought I had no capacity but like basically had to find a way to do it. Um but these things get layered on and then and then the conversation is well you need to be demonstrating innovation. And I'm like, well, there isn't enough capacity that I have to be able to to do that.

Um like basically if if I need to dedicate time towards that I have to stop doing something else or like stop doing something else at work or I have to do I have to make up time outside of work except the second project I'm doing is already outside of work. I've been working Friday nights, Saturdays, Sundays. uh some days staying up late during the week to help. So like there's it's uh it's challenging because I understand the ask but to to go execute on that is not as trivial as it seems. So like uh I took some time this morning to finish up a highlevel when I about to use the word design dog here very uh very loosely but highlevel proposal let's call it for something that I think is innovative and sent that over to my manager uh this morning literally and I'm going to sit down and put a few more of these together.

And I don't actually know how or when I'm going to get the time to do that, but I'm going to because this is the part where I'm trying not to rant about it, but like the it's not a matter of like um no one no one is saying this to me directly, right? But this is how it ends up feeling. Uh no one is saying we don't think that you're capable of innovating. That's no one is saying that. But what they are saying is that there has not been demonstration of that or or a significant amount of it. How I end up internalizing that and that's a this is a me problem. This is why I'm saying I'm not like blaming anyone for it. Um, how I internalize that is like it's almost like you're you're not capable of it or it seems like you're not capable of it cuz if you were, why wouldn't you be doing it?

The reality is in practice it translates into I I have not been capable of it, right? Because it hasn't been done. But that feeling I have internally is that it it's almost like hey it seems like you're not capable of innovating and that's the part that ends up driving me where I go I'll show you right I have four patents it's not that I can't come up with novel ideas I have four patents from when I was working at a startup I can innovate but my priority given everything else that I've been told to focus on has been to execute. Now I'm being informed that like, hey, we trust that you can execute. We need you to innovate. It's like, okay. Uh, so I have to make sure that I do a good job to not drop the ball on the execution while simultaneously layering in innovation.

Now the problem or the next sort of challenge I don't want to call it a problem next sort of challenge that frustrates me is that um if I'm able if I'm able to demonstrate innovation as a manager I know the time frame for having promotions and stuff in place um if I am unable to demonstrate innovation over the next month and a Literally, if I cannot do that, then the next earliest time that I could see a promotion is in September if I can demonstrate innovation. If it's not, then it's another 3 months after that. So it means that no matter what I do, literally no matter what I do, the absolute earliest I could possibly see promotion is already in September of this year, which is after 5 years of being at Microsoft. And I say this because it is incredibly demotivating to me, right?

Not ranting about it. This is just an honest opinion. It is incredibly demotivating to me because I have worked my ass off and I feel like kind of embarrassed almost that I not knowing how big tech is going to operate, especially at my level in terms of the support systems I would need to go from level 65 to 66. I feel almost embarrassed that I didn't try to to get this sorted out sooner. I kind of walked into this being like, I know that I can do a good job, so let me do a good job. And the feedback has consistently been, you're doing a good job, but it's it's insufficient for the next level, right? And that marker feels like it's moving a little bit. Um, but yeah, it's almost like this feeling of like like I feel embarrassed, right? Uh I don't like feeling embarrassed about anything.

So moral of the story is that um I still firmly believe that execution is absolutely everything uh personally but uh that does not translate well at my level. execution is only part of the picture and um there is some amount of politicking if you will that needs to take place. Some people won't call it that. I kind of feel like it is um because let's say I do something innovative. If the people that are part of the conversation uh aren't aware of my innovations, then the same problem applies. So, it's challenging. Um, but I have some things to work on, right? I'm I'm not This is why I said I'm not trying to make this video to blame anyone or to rant about it. This is to kind of shed some light on the things I have to focus on. Um, it just doesn't help when you're completely burnt out with no other capacity.

But we got to make it work. So, we'll figure it out. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.