Sacrificing Too Much For Promotion as a Software Engineer

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, I am just leaving the office here on Tuesday. Going to be in every day this week because we got visitors and we love to see them. Um, I'm going to go to Experience Dev's subreddit for this topic. This one I think is relevant for a lot of people. It's about promotion projects and this person doing a bit of a reflection on on working towards getting pro uh being promoted and uh like in their words getting cold feet about it. So, thought it'd be good to talk through. Um, so a little bit of context. Um, this person said, I don't have it like I'm not reading it cuz I'm literally driving a vehicle, but they were saying that they were working on this this project that their manager gave them and ended up not being sufficient enough for for getting a promotion. I didn't see what level this person's at kind of like in their uh sort of in their career where they're working.

uh just even roughly, right? So, I'm assuming they're not junior and I assume they're not like uh sort of at the the upper extreme tier. So, probably somewhere mid-level towards seniorish is is my my speculation. And um so that wasn't enough. But then apparently there's a part two of this project. We don't really have a lot of details on what the project is, but um you know they were assuming they're going to be kind of wrapped up from doing this work because you know they're done. They're kind of ready to tap out from it and uh realistically because there's a part two. It actually seems like it might be a better fit for them to to do it because they were already doing the part one terms of the knowledge transfer, the ramp up, like all these kinds of things. Like this person's probably a a better fit for it.

And so I think after a little bit of like thinking through it, they're like, "Yeah, like this from a promotion perspective, this project probably does make a lot of sense for them to do the part two of. But I think the the interesting part that's kind of come up for them is they said they started to get cold feet. And when they were talking through it in their comment, they were kind of saying like their reasons for uh wanting to get promoted. when they were kind of reflecting on it, they're like, I want, you know, originally they were kind of like, I want to have earn the respect of my peers and they're like, well, I don't really know if like do I really need a promotion for that? Like, is that really is that really the motivator? They're like, I don't really think so. And then it was like, well, to make more money and they're like, yeah, but like I guess they're making decent money.

They're like, that's not that's not that big of a driver. Um, and they're kind of looking at this going, I wonder if, you know, working towards a promotion is actually going to be something that they regret where they're like, now I'm going to be at this next level and the expectations, the pressure, all these things like maybe this isn't actually what I want. So, they're they're starting to, like they said in their own words, get cold feet about it. So thought this would be an interesting one to to chat through because at least in my experience talking with engineers uh whether that's like people I I genuinely work with or people that I interact with on oops I spat on myself uh interact with on social media and stuff like that like I I don't hear this kind of thing that often and I have

heard it a few times come up but it feels very rare and part of me is kind of curious like how rare is this or is just, you know, coincidence that I haven't really run into people that talk about it this way, but this idea that like maybe I don't want to be pushing harder for the next level. And I've talked about this a little bit in some semi-reent videos on like terminal levels and um the idea being that like so say at Microsoft uh like a senior engineer is a that's a terminal level like if you're at senior it's not like that's a problem or there's like a huge amount of pressure that you know you must get to principal. Um, but like if at a company Oh man, this is tricky to switch these lanes here. There's too much traffic. Everyone's trying to do the same thing.

Give me one sec. I need to uh to think and not speak. Okay, so yeah, like there's uh it's considered a terminal level because at senior or you know senior is considered principal at Microsoft. senior is considered terminal at Microsoft. We got to turn the brain back on. And um and that just means that like there isn't going to be this pressure where you must get to principal. But if you take something like a a junior developer, right? So like SD STD2 kind of thing that's not considered terminal because like you have not from the company's perspective and I'm I'm saying like I've not talked with everyone at the company. I've not talked with the person who made this decision kind of thing. But the idea being that you've not really reached your full potential as a software engineer. So keeping you at a level that's like junior is not it's not wise for the company.

Like if you're if you're sort of at that level for years and years and years, it's like well you're probably not the right candidate for that role. But senior is totally fine. And so what's interesting is that I feel like we don't see this we I don't see this come up a lot in conversations I have where someone's going I think I'm at that point where I'm tapping out now like I said at the beginning of this I don't know if this person is at a senior level or principal or you know some other level or if they're more junior. I don't know that information, but I suspect if they are closer to senior, maybe for them they're kind of realizing like I think I have a balance and I might be teetering on the edge of that which I think and I mean this genuinely I think that's a good self-reflection.

And I had this little I had a discussion with my manager like probably in the last year at some point and I talked about this on code commute and um one of the things we were talking about was like I can't remember the context. It's not like this wasn't like specifically like a scenario like I was working with him on or something, but just in conversation he he made a point that I was like, "Hey, that's like that's actually a good reminder for for like for me and for other people, right? If you find that in order to get promoted that you're doing all of this stuff that has to be so incredible and so far outside of your comfort zone and all of your time and whatever is being consumed, so you're working every single weekend and you're working 80 hours a week and like you need to do that to get promoted.

The the thing about that is that when you get promoted that becomes the new baseline because basically you get promoted when you are effectively operating at the next level and the people that make that decision about your promotion go yeah we see this person operating at that next level. So, if the only way that you can operate at the next level is to basically be doing something that is completely unsustainable for you, that's not a good spot to be in, right? And I, you know, I'm exaggerating with some of my wording here, but I wonder if this person truly is kind of hitting that point where they're like they're having that realization where they're going, I feel like if I need to go do this kind of thing, this is like a set of like priorities and pressure that I don't know if I want to be like sustaining that because that becomes the new normal.

So anyway, I thought that was an interesting reflection and I wanted to talk through that part of this Reddit post because I don't think it happens enough. Um, I'm personally not really wired that way. And I'm not saying that's, you know, right or wrong, good or bad. I'm like, for me personally, it doesn't really work that way. Uh, and maybe that's maybe that is actually not as great because um, you know, I I think I'm probably more prone to like doing things that will cause burnout for myself. Like if I'm kind of reflecting on my my own personality and that kind of stuff, I think I'm I'm probably more prone to it, which is a reminder like I need to I need to be better at like understanding like what what is it that I want, right? uh out of my career and things like that, like work life balance.

Uh but like I I really like to work. Um and the burnout part comes from working on things that I'm not um I'm feeling like aren't having meaning or purpose. Like you put in effort and you're not getting a lot out of it. And it doesn't mean like I'm ne I'm getting a lot out of it personally. I mean like the product of my work is like is like minimal or nothing, right? Like it feels kind of wasteful. That's where I start to feel burnt out. A lot of energy in for not a lot coming out of it. So anyway, I I know that about myself. And uh let's super merge everyone. Come on. There we go. Excellent. Good job. Good job, friends. Anyway, like I think something for you to think about, right? Um if you haven't had that conversation with yourself ever before, like it's probably good.

Like what what is actually driving you to want to be at the next level? I don't think there's wrong answers, right? If you're like, "Man, I just want to get paid more." Like that's totally fine. I'm not telling you that's wrong or right. If you like this person was saying, you know, I want to be respected by my peers. Like, hey, like if if that's the thing that you feel like moves you in that direction. It's not for me or anyone else to tell you like you're not allowed to want that. Whether or not you you get out of that what you're hoping for is a different story. I don't know the answer to that. But like if that's your your motivator, like that's you're allowed to be motivated by whatever you'd like. There's too many cars and we got to merge. We got to get to that fast lane before it's too late.

There's an opening. Hell yeah. We'll sneak in here. One down. Two to go. Another opening. Let's go. Come on. Nice. We got one more. Sorry folks. This traffic is like stupid cuz I left like right at five. This person's coming in. I'm taking their spot. Couldn't have worked out any better. Okay. Excellent. So, anyway, part one of this is go do that reflection exercise. I highly recommend it. Something you can revisit periodically. I'm overdue for it personally. Um the most recent kind of version of this that I've done for myself is like I know that from a from the perspective of like working at a company like Microsoft or you know other other companies in general I have a I have goals within that where I need like to feel fulfillment I need to move in the direction of like um something that's closer to directorship.

And I say that as someone like literally the people that I used to manage are in director roles and uh I've been kind of like you know in a middle manager position uh sort of like the lowest level of manager position for 13 years and I'm in a weird spot where like for me to to make progress in my career in that direction. Um, if I just and I'm I'm being fully transparent about what this looks like. I'm not complaining about the work that I do. I very much enjoy what I am currently doing. So, if I want to sort of move in that direction, that basically is uh like an an M2 like a manager to a director um senior manager depending on where you are and how you want to title it.

title doesn't matter so much but the that type of work I want to have more strategic opportunity and I want to work with other managers to help coach and mentor other managers I want to be leading them so that I can help them through all of the stuff that I've learned over the last 13 years as being a manager right I would like to be in that position and um the challenging part is that if I stay on the team that I'm on it could need to experience some type of rapid growth that puts me into such a position, but like we're so far away from that that if anything, the team would grow and my manager would hire on another manager under him, which would make the most sense. Like I'm like I said, I'm not I'm not here like complaining about it. I'm just trying to lay lay it out.

That would make the most sense. And so, okay, that means that opportunity for me to grow the way that I would really like to in my career long term, it actually does not make sense to be here, right? And again, I'm not saying that means I'm out, but for the goals that I'm after in terms of my career progression, I don't see that path. Now, here's the why it's like a bit of a trap is because if I want that, most companies will not hire someone at an M2 level unless they have that type of experience. They often will say like, I don't care if you've been a manager. Like, that's that's nice. Like if you want to be managing other managers, you better have done that learning on someone else's watch and bring that experience to us. We don't want to take that risk on you.

Right? So that means that in order for me to get such experience, I need to look I would need to look for either a new team that they're they're hopefully rapidly growing and I can say cool, let me jump into that. So as they're rapidly growing like I could have such an opportunity come up or I would need to go to a different company where that's uh probably going to be a very small company where I can be part of their rapid growth because otherwise it's like it's just not really going to happen. So that's one career path for me and the other thing that would be really fulfilling for me is I would like to be running my own business. Like that's I think ultimately the thing that would give me the most fulfillment. I'd like to run my own software engineering company, right?

So, I I've done that reflection recently, semi-reently, but I think I'm overdue for like figuring out how that actually looks like what just because I've thought through it like I I didn't I haven't taken an action or anything like that or I haven't had a conversation with my manager or my skip to be like, "Hey, like this is the direction I want to move in." And unfortunately, I don't really see them going, "Oh, great. Like here's here's a clear path to that." But if I haven't had the conversation then like what I can't really expect that they could do anything. So anyway recommend that you go through it and do that periodically to understand that about yourself. Next up with this topic though is that I wanted to talk about projects being used for promotion because I think this gets misused like crazy. Um, I have been very transparent with my employees that I do not use projects specifically attached to promotion.

I think it's the wrong thing to do. I don't think that it means that you cannot leverage projects for it, but I don't like attaching projects to promotion. Does not make sense to me. And I can explain why for a handful of reasons. one is that um I can't actually make that promise, right? I might be able to uphold my end and say, "Hey, like you did that project. Awesome. Like I'm happy to go give you my support for promotion." Depending on that person's level, that might be completely out of my control after that, right? Even I'm just making this up, but my manager could be like, "No." Or my manager might be cool with it. My skip level might say no.

or all three of us might be on the same page and saying hell yeah and then the other delegates from the CVP are not on the same page and then they say no and then this person's left like sitting there going but Nick you said if I do this project and I crush it that's going to be enough and then I'm wrong I don't promise that stuff it makes no sense to me right but what you can do and sorry let me couple more things I want to I want to talk about that a little bit more. So, the other thing that sucks about doing that kind of thing is when priorities change. Okay. So, when you attach everything in a promotion to a project, this person's freaking out behind me. Just the traffic. We're all in it, pal. Don't worry. Um, I can see them holding their head and tossing their arms up.

Um, when you attach everything about your promotion to landing a specific project, what happens when priorities change? We've, if you've been working as a software developer for a while, you've probably seen stuff get rep prioritized, right? We got to switch from this project to something else. Something's come up. Huge dependency block. We can't move in that path anymore. We have to go down this path. Like, if that happens to your project, then what? you have all of this like concept of your promotion like therefore I cannot get promoted I have to wait a whole other year whatever it happens to be because I can't land this project that we talked about doing and this is a reminder for engineering managers too like if you're listening to this like this is another reason why I recommend that you don't do that you don't you don't attach them together you can relate these things but don't attach catch them and be very transparent about that with employees.

Okay, so what the hell is Nick really blabbing about and how can you start to leverage these things together? I think that you can look at what requirements are needed for promotion. Okay, let's look at what that actually means. If you have things like rubrics or talent guides or career guides that that give you expectations, levels set for those roles, right? like what are the expectations right you need to I'm just making this up you need to be able to demonstrate like your technical excellence we do that through uh you know for depending on your level that could be like large scale designs right designs plural right you've been able to work through these complex systems there's some component of mentorship there's some component of this of that um and you need to be able to demonstrate all these things right you can say hey look this project is an opportunity where you can demonstrate all of these things.

And you know what? That smaller thing that you're working on the side, like that's a great opportunity to demonstrate some of these things. That other small thing, a way to demonstrate some of these things. Like you need to make sure that you have some surface area across multiple because when everything is anchored to a single project, that's like, you know, single point of failure in someone's career progression. No chance. Not not happening. So I really am a fan of saying hey look let's talk about the areas that you need to work on to be able to demonstrate that let's align on those things great now how are we going to support growth in those directions right and then it's like cool depending on someone's level hey look this project's coming up this is only internal within the team but it's a pretty like significant project

for us and it's not uh it's there's a little bit of ambiguity right so That could be something that is good for someone who's more junior or mid-level to say, "Hey, look, this is your first opportunity to really take and own something end to end." Like, this could be great. It's not, you know, cross team and like across the organization and like we're setting you up to fail because it's going to be, you know, ridiculous for you to try and coordinate, but something that is has enough ambiguity for someone more junior that maybe there's other people on the team that they're like, "Okay, if I sat down and worked through this, I could I could figure it out, too.

That means I can help them, right?" So setting up opportunities for people and then being able to say like I think that this is a good opportunity for career progression because it will touch on these things right you might for someone more senior it might be this is a really good opportunity to go cross team on this we have to partner with this other team to get this work done they're a dependency for us we're a dependency for them whatever it happens to be and then talk through why that's relevant for working towards promotion Right. I've mentioned more recently um you know for some of my more senior folks on the team and this includes for myself like trying to share out more updates like organizationally right who are the stakeholders for this keep them up to date as you're going through it because in

some cases it's like people know about the work maybe not always they might know about the work and if they know about the work they might not even know who's worked on it. So, can you imagine the conversation when someone's like, "Hey, like this person's being considered for promotion. Like, what's your feedback on them?" And they're like, "I don't really know what they do, right?" And then if you were to say, I'm just kind of giving you this contrived example, but it's like, "Hey, like, but this other project, you know, like you you know that project, right? That's an awesome project." And oh, yeah, like I uh pretty familiar with like the impact that that had. I heard so and so talking about it, whatever.

like that's yeah that's significant like if if that's not correlated for that individual right that like this person is the person that drove that here's the role they played in that here's the significance of their time and effort into that and why they made that project successful if that's not linked together then like that conversation could go completely unnoticed I'm not saying that it should but like I would understand how it could so instead of creating these opportunities for or creating the opportunities for like missed coverage. I would much rather work with people to communicate this stuff more regularly, get the right visibility to it, right? But this this is all like different strategies, different levels um to work on with people and individuals are going to be different because they're focusing on different parts of their career journeys, right?

So, as this person was talking about like, you know, part two of their project, um, I had like one of the people uh I had, sorry, I read one of the the comments from someone saying like, "Hey, look, like if part one wasn't enough for your promotion, what makes you think part two is going to be good enough for your promotion?" And like, yeah, maybe that's that might be fair, but like there's there's not enough context for for anyone on the internet to be, including me, to make like a an informed decision about that, right? We have no idea what the hell's going on in that situation, right? We don't know what this person was saying. Like, it's a good opportunity for them to lead it, like to be able to deliver more value. like I don't know what does their manager say about it, right?

Like that's really what's going to what it's going to come down to at a minimum. It's not even guaranteed, but at a minimum. So, if we're thinking about this, right, this person who commented saying, "What makes you think part two will be enough?" Well, go back to what I said a little bit earlier. What opportunities does part two enable for this individual to demonstrate? Right? Maybe part one looked like X and they could, you know, they got to put a design dock together. They got to work with some partner teams to have that architecture reviewed. They got to start carrying out parts of that and maybe there was actually some opportunity where they could lead a couple of the engineers on the team, their own team to be able to to work on some of those pieces.

So doing some coordination and and you know like managing some of the the work being done on the team for it like great okay like that's that's good and then maybe the feedback was like that's when it's not sufficient is like well maybe the scope of impact wasn't enough right like we need something more broad than that maybe it's like the um so the the um the amount of impact versus the scope I guess is the other part maybe the part that they're not seeing for promoting that person is they're like hey look like there's there wasn't enough cross team like collaboration on this there wasn't like whatever it happens to be whatever is being you know whatever the reason is for being rejected for a promotion like we don't know what those gaps were and that means we don't know what the gaps are and we don't know what's necessarily being offered up in V2 of this but perhaps V2 is offering up some of those gaps Right?

We don't know that. And that's why I wanted to share this example that I've shared on code canv. Okay. I had an employee that was working on a project and this was a big migration project, not something that was um like driven by our team, but uh this person I don't want to say they volunteered. They like agreed to to representing our team on the migration part. we had to take care of for this uh this big effort. Bunch of teams had to go do this and this individual was taking this work on. So um this was something that I think was good for him to get uh better understanding across our code base um build up confidence like kind of build some momentum within the team to make sure that he could independently work on things. And yeah, in the beginning there were some challenges, right?

because he's learning how to go through it, right? And then it got to the point where it's like uh you know the challenges that he's facing, it's like he's he's actually facing challenges because other people on the team think they have the right answer. They're not agreeing. So he has to go in and like he hasn't had to do this kind of thing necessarily where he's trying to like mediate hey look you're saying we have to do X you're saying you have to do Y and like based on my experience it's either X Y or maybe it's Z which is some hybrid so like yeah he had some challenges that he had to navigate like that and it wasn't perfectly smooth but that's great experience that he had to get out of that right so he does this project for roughly a year And like that's not enough to get him promoted.

And I didn't promise him promotion or anything with that project, but I said this is this project enables a lot of really awesome stuff in terms of progression. And that includes a bunch of the stuff I was just saying, right? In terms of like building some of that momentum, independence, and then working through some challenging situations, right? Like you're starting to take some ownership over this, which is great. Now I did have a V2 of this project. I inherited another team and they had to do the same kind of migration. Different code base, different uh different tech stack, but same same migration they had to take care of. And I said to this person, cuz they were reaching the point where they're like, "Okay, like I'm ready to tap out from this. Thank you very much." Like it's been it's been quite some time. you know, the work starts to become less interesting when it becomes more repetitive.

And we had this conversation about it. I said, there's a there is a V2 of this, right? And like, you don't have to agree to this. It's totally fine. Like, I want I want to have the conversation with this person. But I said, I think you might be a great fit to lead this because what we can do is set you up such that you're not carrying out all of the migration yourself like you were doing for V1. This is now an opportunity to show and demonstrate that based on what you did in V1, you can lead the next group of engineers through it. You can help them prioritize and figure out what parts of the code need to be done first, what parts can be done in parallel, right? They're going to have challenges when they're working through that stuff. You can help guide them, help them understand like when they're hitting roadblocks because you've been through this a whole bunch of times.

Right? Like you basically can use a similar domain that you were just in for a long time and kind of do the like I'm going to call it like the leveled up version of that. And I'm not saying it's wrong or right to be do the actual hands-on migration versus trying to coordinate it, but like you can do a like a a higher level version of that. And he thought about it and he was like, "Okay, like I think I think that would be good." And I said, "Okay, here's if you do this kind of thing, here's some of the things that we get to see when we're talking about expectations in terms of career growth. You get to see some more mentorship. You get to see leading projects at a larger scale. Now, we get to see you building on the experience and expertise of an area that you already had.

Like you start to basically demonstrate more of these qualities that we are looking for. So, this was an example, and I'm not saying they're all like this, but this was an example where someone got to work on a V2 of something that would set them up significantly better for promotion. Okay. So, I just wanted to share that because like the question of like what makes you think V2 is going to be worth it? It's a fair question and I think that that becomes like going back to what I said earlier like it can be a dangerous thing when you have managers that are like dangling projects in front of you to be like this is the way to promotion and the thought is that like you know I just must do must you know check the box for project delivery therefore promotion and it's like it's not it's just not a good way to look at at it.

There's too many like it's too much of a single point of failure, too much all or nothing. And I I just don't think that's the right way personally. So what should this person do? I don't know. I think back to the original thing they were saying. Maybe it's a matter of like I don't know. Like it depends. I I don't know how much effort it's going to be for them to take this project on. I think if they're stressing about it, it might be good to um to be honest with themselves about it. My my personal take and I am not this person so it's not fair for me to say and also it's not like I manage this person and I have a a better understanding of them more than just reading you know a Reddit post. But uh for me personally, I would be wanting to have a pep talk with myself about like this like this could be imposter syndrome.

This could be like maybe I feel like the level of stress and stuff is largely due to the uncertainty around it. uncertainty around my performance with it and perhaps um you know perhaps if I persevere through that that will teach me a lot and then maybe that is like the right thing to do. I would I would probably work on convincing myself that like it's worth pushing through even though it might be uncomfortable. And again that's like that's some of my bias based on how I am and I'm not saying that's necessarily the right thing for others to do. It's not a stop sign. People keep going. It's literally There is no stop. There is only go. So anyway, I think that's it for this topic. Um hopefully that was kind of interesting to to chat through. If you have questions that you want answered, just leave them below in the comments or go to codemute.com.

You can submit questions anonymously. Uh, and then I have other YouTube channels if you're interested. So, this is primarily just uh, you know, vlog Q&A style, but if you go to Dev Leader, that's my main YouTube channel. I have C tutorials, programming tutorials using AI tools, uh, all that fun stuff. Those are edited down, so hopefully there's a lot less rambling from me and a lot more uh, the value to to time is greater for the the task that you're trying to solve. So, that's dev leader. Then I have Devleader path to tech which is ré reviews. So if you're interested in having your resume reviewed for free, go to dev leader path to tech on YouTube. You can check that out, see how to submit a resume, see how the uh other ré reviews go so that you're comfortable with what that looks like. And then otherwise I have the Devleer podcast which is as you might imagine a podcast channel and I interview other software engineers.

You get to see their career journeys and some unique things about what they're doing in their careers. But that's also where I hold my live streams. So if you enjoy Code Commute, the topics at least once a week I basically write a newsletter article on the most popular topic of the week from Code Commute. And then I do a live stream Mondays 700 p.m. Pacific, the Dev Leader podcast on YouTube. and we go through the newsletter article and the code commute video topic so that uh you can ask anything you want about the topic or anything about software engineering and career stuff and I'll try my best to chat through that and uh really appreciate all the folks from code commute that come over to that because it's uh it's cool to get to engage with you folks. So thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.

Take care.