Also: do you want a promotion or just a raise?
A promotion means you are getting a different job, typically leadership, which means working with people more with machines. If you are better with machines than you are with people, do you really want that? does your employer really wants that? If you are twice as fast and twice as good as others doing some job, and if you like that job, what you want is double pay, not a promotion to a position you won't be as good at.
That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
> your managers have heard about it too
Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'm sure most managers and executives on HN though doesn't think like that, surely are the exception. But out in the wild world, people truly get promoted mostly on whims and personal relationships without thinking "are they better with machines than people perhaps?", because that's the easy way. People also feel excluded if they aren't considered for promotions, even if the promotion in question wouldn't make sense.
> Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'd say the opposite is true. In modern management theory, the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued.
I a big company I worked with, they had a special program for future top managers, they have them do grunt work in several departments for several years before they get the position they are hired for.
We had one of these guys working with us at one point, awesome guy: friendly, humble and good at everything he does, including partying! We only knew he was "special" much later, when he left us to continue his journey.
I have many bad things to say about this company, but this is not it: hiring people who are actually good, making them understand the work the company does by practicing, and thinking long term, hats off.
But back to the subject, even though the guy did actual productive work with us, and did it competently, he wasn't destined to be an expert, he was destined to be a manager and he was only here to get enough domain knowledge for that job. This is not the same path as a technical expert who will keep doing the same job, but better.
Story I've told here once. A director I worked under had climbed up from the bottom.
Now one weekend, us 3 ITers were going to replace the building switches and fix and cleanup the network cabling and move all servers. Massive weekend job. We start saturday morning, and deadline is monday morning or 400 people cant work. A second team is doing the phones. He promised to be there to open the door for us.
Junior me comes in, and he is at the door, with breakfast! We begin. He's not technical, so he resigns himself to sitting in the corner, popping ethernet cables out of bags as we request them.
He sees what we do, where we struggle. He sees IT take out the plan and execute it steadily, while the phoners are missing their team lead and every phone forgot its number. I learned PBXing on the fly there and had more fun than a job is supposed to be.
At the end of the weekend, all is well and monday is actually boring (except the emergency phone in the elevator wont stop ringing and connects random elevatees to customers. Oops. My bad. Forgot to reprogram that one.)
The next weekend, the bookkeepers have to do some mysterious all weekend bookkeeping thing. Director is not a bookkeeper at all. He was there, doing the bookkeeper equivalent of unbagging ethernet cables.
Now that smiling, helpfull man turns out to be a wolf in every exec meeting. He knows just enough about every job in the company. You can't fool him for 1 millimeter. You flood him with jargon, he jargons right back at you. In his circle of evil backstabbers, with life changing decisions to make, he's an absolutely scary steamwaltz. I admire him and don't want the job even if he makes a fortune.
Every manager I've ever had sees me as an extremely competent multidisciplinary engineer. So obviously ever one of them thinks I'd be perfect for management. Every time I've tried a management role, it's been a flaming disaster.
At my last job I argued for six months on this point with my manager. I eventually relented and... disaster.
I don't know how to more clearly articulate "I cannot and will not manage others. I am not capable and it will end badly." But apparently that's not clear and understandable enough for management brain.
New job now and I think the boss is intelligent enough to understand "no, that is not possible"
> the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued
Sure, but you can always pick that up as you learn how things work. It's a bit harder to do that in engineering as it requires years of experience with your craft.
Just like a manager just starting out isn't gonna have the right intuition and hunches until some years of experience, you can't just "pick that up", that is the expertise, unlike domain knowledge.
Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?
Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.
Eh, I'm not entirely sure if you commented this to the wrong parent comment, if not, how is this connected to what I wrote about?
Just to clarify just in case; We're talking about domain knowledge here, not management knowledge, I'm not entirely clear how that maps to your example, as you're talking about any general experience I suppose? I'm not saying we should put people without experience into management positions, if that's the misreading you did.
True, but many types of employment don't support this kind of raise without a promotion.
Which in engineering, is ridiculous.
We've all met many brilliant engineers with the social skills of a lettuce. The idea they cannot get a raise in salary unless promoted to management is just daft.
It appears the problem is many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy; despite the fact the job descriptions are vastly different.
> many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy
Yeah, I never understood this. As a manager I've always strived to earn less than those I help do their job (meaning pushing their salary up whenever I could), they're doing all the heavy lifting and I'm just along for the ride trying to unblock them and coordinate stuff. Not sure why there are managers who think they should earn more than the people doing the grunt-work, but then again, the world is filled with people who think they're more important than they are.
If that is true then hats off. You are a very rare breed.
Though one should consider that eventually (additional) legal responsibilities come into play, that need to be worth something as well.
Unfortunately, management can remain irrational longer than your income can keep up with the rising cost of living
Many executives consider managing peoples is harder than managing machines, and that having many people working together have a better value than a single person.
As such, many want a raise, but no-one want to manage peoples and have responsibilities that involve human factor (state otherwise, it is easier to be sure about the result of your own work than the work of your whole team). That’s the reason why it is easier to ask for a raise as a manager than a single coder.
Yea, in the company I work in (entire country it seems tbh) - it's exceedingly rare for contributers to get a raise over a certain point. If I want to increase my income I kinda have to go into management.
I'm sure there are outliers, but this seems to be the norm.
> That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
All this sort of thing was true when I went to management college, last century, and it was well known to my line management, and yet, nevertheless, all the observations were still true because in effect it's an observation about human nature. It would be guidance if people were guided by it, but they aren't.
"I know that's a bad idea, but I'll do it anyway" counts for "We should fire all the people whose performance review didn't rate them above average" just like "I only had a couple glasses of wine, I'm fine to drive".
A funny scene in 30 Rock is when Tracy learns about the Peter Principle and responds "but my incompetence knows no bounds!"
In tech companies, there’s usually both technical and management tracks, and you can be promoted up the ladder (many times over) without changing jobs. At a certain point you’ll do less design and coding, and more high level strategy, but that’s not until you’re nearing the top of the ladder.
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Is this an USA thing? I know I left the management track, but in my world, promotions is something you ask for and then you figure out how to get them, and then you... well get them. Like if an IT support guy wants to get into sysadmin, they will then plan it with their manager. Usually this means they'll work to get some sort of related certificate and then once they get it, they'll move into a role that suits their new abilities. Sometimes they'll need to "level up" their abilities a few times before they completely leave support, but they'll get there as quick as possible. If you don't they'll just leave for another company.
I guess this article is for the management track?
I'd say its extremely company dependent and not really country dependent. Some companies have these type of talks with their employees, most I've been at do not. What's far more common is silently getting more responsibilities as time passes but never get an official promotion. So consider yourself lucky if your company is that open and communicative about actual promotions. Also, its not a promotion if it doesn't pay more (just putting it out there because I've ran into people that simply got a different title as a "promotion").
In my country, every company I've been to works like that. No matter if their HQ is in US, UK or here.
I think it is a cultural thing.
Promotion at most companies is competitive. So multiple people want the same role. So you need a sorting mechanism.
Counterpoint: in a lot of companies, especially larger companies, roles are designed to fit existing staff, rather than staff being selected for roles.
It applies to the technical track too, which has levels you can move up. The names of levels vary from company to company, but most seem to have ~10, so there’s plenty of room to move up the technical ladder. I’m in the US, so I’m not sure if this applies elsewhere.
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Promotions are always discussed in the context of "How to get promoted?". In my opinion, an important angle is left out of these discussion and conversations: do you really want to get promoted? is it worth it?
To make it simple binary, I think there are 2 kinds of promotions:
A. the kind where you pretty much continue doing what you were doing before, but with a nicer title and more money
B. the kind where the new role will put you into a whole new situation, which may or may not be a good fit for you
People always assume it'll be like 1., but there are certain career inflection points where this is not true. Approximating these in 3 minutes of typing:
1. Going from junior IC levels (where others work extra hard to support you, and are doing much of the work with you, for you) to mid IC levels.
2. Going from IC to becoming a manager.
3. Going to executive level.
4. Going to board-level executive level.
Note: I'm putting aside the handful of tech companies where people can stay on the technical track and still get ahead; at most companies you end up going into management, if for no other reason to avoid an incompetent outside hire to end up as your boss..
In the above list, 1. is of course desirable and unavoidable, but the rest should be thought over hard, for many months, and should be considered a major life decision.
Eg. recently I'v been promoted from Sr. Director (a non-executive management role) to VP (an executive manager role) — I didn't ask for it, it was a result of a re-org — and it's been super tough. Completely new rules, new crowd, new worries, but with all the worries of my old job..
As a people manager I constantly have staff ICs telling me they want to get promoted to become a Director, and I always tell them — from the bottom of my heart — enjoy the "simple life" of IC-ship while you can, once you go over to management [at any bigco], things will be much less fun. Because, if coding and building things is fun for you, then managing PIPs, procurements, vendor engagements, and corporate politics in general will not be fun.
As someone around 50y, and that much rather stay an IC than anything management, although it is unavoidable up to a point, due to mentoring and having a senior role, so far the only way to avoid being dragged into full management has been either leave the company, or being honest regardless of the possible outcome, that is what I plan to do if forced into it.
Apparently it is quite hard to pass the message that not everyone has a lifetime goal to land in management, which is a quite hard thing to fight against because in many countries, as computing is seen as yet another office job unlike the SV glamour of FAANGs, where you only succeed in life by becoming a manager.
> Do you want to get promoted?
If it pays more money - yes. Even if it does not, you can leverage position and find a different job with said new position that does pay more money.
I strongly think this is the wrong attitude. After a point, money does not buy happiness, job satisfaction or sanity.
Yeah, but I want to get to that point.
Currently, there are a lot of things in my life (old house, old cars, etc) that more money will simply remove from being a headache in my life.
Nobody is going to say no to 100k to 150k bump from developing to managing.
200k to 250k is a different story.
It is all relative, but in general vast majority of people would be in first example.
"After a point", yes.
But that point—at least in terms of its dollar value—keeps rising, and these days it's out of reach of far too many non-managers.
Well, and that's a major part of the problem: Even if you continue doing better and better work in your current job, you will never get paid more for it. If you want more pay, you have to seek a promotion, and the only jobs that get paid really well are management jobs.
Frankly, this smells a lot like a continuation of the old feudal mindset, where the people who tell other people what to do are considered to be more worthy, more valuable, better people, than the people who just...make things with their hands.
There's really no inherent reason why the person who is coordinating my team should be considered to be more valuable than me. And there's certainly no reason why the organization should consider me qualified for that position just because I do this one really well: management is a different skillset, that one doesn't naturally gain just by doing a non-management job really well. (And I can say this with some certainty, because I have seen both very good and very bad managers, and the difference is night and day. Not just on the morale of the people they're managing, but in the results of what they create.)
> Businesses don’t do promotions at senior levels because you “deserve” it. They promote those who have the highest potential to deliver outsized impact and value.
What I've seen more of is: people get promoted because they already do the job at the higher level, or close to it
> What I've seen more of is: people get promoted because they already do the job at the higher level, or close to it
That's exactly how it works in my company (small org). They clearly state that the person needs to be doing "the needful" for around a year before being officially promoted to the position.
Genuinely curious - is that not thow it usually works?
Sean Goedecke articulated a different theory of promotion (at large tech companies; it probably does generalize to large non-tech companies and almost certainly won't generalize to small companies):
He said that you get a promotion for one of two reasons:
(a) the company is afraid that, without the promotion, you'll leave; or
(b) the company wants you to accomplish some task, and believes that you will be better able to do it if granted additional political power.
This post seems to agree well with that option (b). It advises that you make the case for your own promotion based on two prongs:
(1) the success of my project is important to the business;
(2) my project is more likely to succeed if I am promoted.
(The post also throws full support to option (a).)
This seems, to me, to be a fairly dysfunctional way of operating, at least as a general rule.
It's far, far too easy for an organization that operates this way to abuse it: oh, you want to be promoted to Assistant Director? Here are all the tasks of Assistant Director; better get doing them for a while and prove to us you can do the job!
...Oh, it's been a year and you want the promotion? Sorry! We just hired a new Assistant Director. Time to train your new boss, because we already know you're great at the job! (What? Oh, yes; that is the Director's nephew, how good of you to spot that! That's why we knew he'd be a great fit.)
> Genuinely curious - is that not thow it usually works?
IME, it's far more common for one of two setups to be in place:
a) If you want a promotion, you have to prove that you've been doing the job you're in very well over a longer period of time—and, in many cases, if you fail to achieve a promotion after a certain length of time, you're fired. (The "Up or Out" philosophy.) In some cases, you don't even explicitly apply for a promotion; if you do well enough in your performance reviews over time, you're just given the promotion, whether you want it or not.
b) If you want a promotion—too bad. We don't promote from within. Well, we don't outright say that. Some people can get promoted from within—they just have to kiss the right asses the right way at the right times. But we'll absolutely expect you to take on the work of your colleagues who leave because the work environment sucks. And your boss, when they leave. But without extra pay.
Doing the job "at a higher level" isn't enough. There must also be a 'bus factor' at play.
Otherwise you're the shmuck who does expensive work cheaper. If you start making trouble and ask for more money you're better off being replaced with another ambitious shmuck who's willing to work cheap without causing trouble.
Either that or nepotism.
Or just popularity (perceived impact vs actual impact)
I used to care about all these stuff and work hard towards "the next level". Guess what? Nothing happened, despite multiple people told me they think I did way more than what a promotion requires.
So I stop giving it any attention. Promote me if you want, but otherwise I'm just going to jump ship to a place that recognizes my talent.
The massive missing factor here is personality.
You can be the most impactful person going but if you are an asshole then you won't get promoted.
Edit: maybe I should say - an asshole to management, or bring up difficult things, etc.
The exact opposite is true in some places: being a massive asshole is often rewarded because those people are able to bully others into getting what the assholes want done. Only it's dubbed "influencing". The higher up you go the more toxic and defensive the political landscape.
I have massive empirical evidence against your statement.
Depends on the company. In most companies, you MUST be an asshole to get promoted.
Popularity with the persons in charge of promotions surely helps... But it doesn't mean you need to be popular with other people.
If you are at a place where that’s true, cherish it. It won’t always be true.
> Businesses don’t do promotions at senior levels because you “deserve” it. They promote those who have the highest potential to deliver outsized impact and value.
I guess it will sound like a nitpick, but to me it matters a lot:
They promote those they believe have the highest potential to bring value.
The whole thing is that the person who promotes you is a human in a dominant position. You can't change their mind about what they believe is a good reason to promote an employee, because they are in a position to feel superior.
If you want a promotion, you have to do whatever those with that power want to see in order to give you a promotion. If that involves bringing doughnuts every Monday morning, you have to do it.
Luckily, cargo cult means that those people probably all read the same kind of books, so a valid proxy may be to just read those books and try to fit in this completely arbitrary world. Coaches are people who decided that instead of reading those books to try and get a promotion themselves, they would just make a business out of reading those books and selling you that knowledge.
> They promote those they believe have the highest potential to bring value.
Thank you for writing that! That would have been my first comment as well. Due to the organizational hierarchy, there is a standard assumption that the company or the decision-makers within the company are magically capable of making objective assessments and decisions. Of course, this is not the case. But in the style of corporate language, there is often a strategic concealment of the fact that in every functional role, even at the very top, individuals work and make subjective decisions (hopefully competently, hopefully to the best of their knowledge and belief, but nonetheless always subjectively).
Unless you work in a metric driven role ( like sales ) - of course it's subjective. Also bear in mind the assessment includes not just what you do, but how you do it.
Not pissing other people off is an important skill, but at higher levels so is being able to make the right decision even if it's not very popular.
Being able to do both simultaneously is gold dust.
A lot of metric-driven roles are subjective as well. Most sales funnels are intentionally a random lottery. When prioritization exists it is often influenced by all those subjective categories like "management likes you".
As software developers we often see the raw data of this. The science often even isn't that hard based on the software you are asked to write how almost none of the "objective" metrics are truly "fair".
Metrics aren't an escape from subjectivity, they just smoke screen it. Companies love "rich get richer" lotteries and easily confuse that for "objective" or "fair".
> Unless you work in a metric driven role
A metric is a proxy, always. Even for sales. If the sales increase but the satisfaction of the users decreases, that's not necessarily good.
IMO, the worst thing one can do with a metric is believe that it is subjective. Give me a metric, I will optimise for it.
Doesn't mean that having metrics is useless. It's just important to understand what they mean.
If you are in a company where all that truly applies - I'm not sure your best option is to look for a promotion - you'd be better off looking for another employer.
Even if you take the completely cynical view that bosses are out for themselves - then if after promotion you stay in their team, they are going to what to manage promotions in a way that makes them look good.
Now if what makes them look good is not related to improved impact/output then I refer you to by previous advice about getting a promotion by leaving, but most of the time it is - are you helping them hit their( the teams ) goals?
I guess my point is that when a coach teaches you how to get a promotion, the implicit assumption is that your hierarchy is following the same book as they are.
And the very fact that one needs to learn how to behave to get a promotion kind of proves my point. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to go convince someone that you have value. And in a world where you have to do that convincing... those who are better at convincing get more promotions.
Because you are better at convincing does not mean you bring more value, though.
Again it's a hard problem, but what matters to me is that people understand that it is a hard problem and there is no silver bullet.
In my experience, promotion depends on: (a) is cheaper (including on boarding) to fire and hire or pay more, (b) will it cause domino effect so others will also ask for promotions, (c) will employee find an offer outside (matter of personal traits and market conditions).
Personal performance and achievements are usually secondary.
YMMV
The real promotion is when you get out of this corporate bullshit.
So glad I don't have to deal with any of that crap anymore.
Do you freelance now? If so, how's that going in this new world when people believe they can just ask AI to do it for them?
Yeah I've been freelancing fully remote from France since 2016. Clients are in the US.
I work in quantitative finance, it's a fairly complicated field. I use Claude Code myself to code faster, but at the end of the day, the guys I work for need the numbers to be correct, and they still need people to make sure that everything is right.
Quantitative finance is a funny field. To work in it for an employer, one has to be somewhat smart. If however one were actually smart, one wouldn't need to do quantitative finance for someone else, only for oneself, and directly reap the benefits of one's work in the markets.
the employer raises the capital, so that you invest the someone else’s money.
This has 2 main advantages:
1. You have limited downside. if you lose all the investor’s money, you don’t lose any of your own money - and contractually you still get paud the management fee.
2. It’s way more lucrative to get a very tiny part of the returns on a 1bn investment, than to get all the returns on a 100k investment…
Honestly, I've never known any company that has a good promotion and career development structure. Most shoehorn you into management roles or force you to jump through hoops to get a promotion so nowadays I don't care as long as I get a decent salary, 33 days of annual leave and they let me take off 3 weeks to go to Japan every year
No offense to the author, a good article, but seems he may live outside of the US, or maybe works at a small company.
My experience as a developer, in the 80s and most of the 90s, there was a benefit to a promotion. Since about 2000, promotions means:
1. A fancier title (who cares).
2. No Salary Raise, a big issue for me and what I miss the most.
3. More responsibility.
Why bother push for a promotion these days ?
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