Creative Ways to Avoid Promotion
I am great at some things. Those things aren’t always my job, and certainly aren’t always promotable in isolation. It has been 19 years since I got my first post-College software job. Ostensibly I’ve gotten better at it and learned a lot. Looking at my current job title and history it would stand to reason that I’ve been promoted a lot.
This is a trick that I have played on all of you. Maybe most of all on myself? TBD. In any event, my career progression has looked like this:
Opus Healthcare Solutions
September 2004 (took me 4 months after graduation to find a job): Hired as a software analyst. I won’t provide a full salary. I am grateful folk like
have, and there’s too many variables for me to get there. I am OK with this one, though. $34k/year. I had no idea what was “normal”. It was more than my Helpdesk job at my University, and a full time job with benefits.February 2006: Promotion #1 in my career. A more senior support position was created and I was promoted into along with one other analyst. I was a Software Support Engineer.
February 2007: I moved to a Software Engineer role. I say moved because while a more rigorous progression path was later developed and this was made a promotion, for me it wasn’t. I was told it was a lateral move. I didn’t have the knowledge or saavy to better argue or self-advocate.
Convio
July 2011: Changed companies, got a modest salary bump. My title was “Software Engineer”, but that was the bottom of their ladder. I didn’t know that it maybe wasn’t appropriate to have 6.5 years of experience and be hired into the most junior role.
Amazon
June 2012: Changed companies again. This was certainly the biggest pay bump I experienced, and I still think I was on the lower end of the range for an SDE-II at the time. It wasn’t an entry-level software engineering role, which was a first. I hadn’t thought of it this way, but it was the first time I “promoted myself” by switching companies.
~June 2014-December 2017: I don’t have the details of dates for every failed attempt, but in this period of time I was mostly reporting to senior engineering managers and leading multiple teams of engineers. I was owning large, cross org projects. These sound like senior-level things. I felt like I was doing the right things, and succeeding. I wasn’t hyper-aware of what was needed to be promoted. I would look at the rubric and see big over-performance on some Sr. SDE criteria, and OK examples of others. OK wasn’t enough. I had a document written and sent to a panel, or reviewed by a director and rejected 3 times in this period. There wasn’t a “keystone project” that I coded enough, or owned the right way, or performed in front of the right people. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, or how to sell my achievements. To be fair, with stock growth and high ratings I was being paid a lot. But it was impermanent and for the first time I got a midrange rating and my comp target cut by 25%.
January 2018 (official ~June 2018): I made a lateral move at L5 (midrange at Amazon, not senior) to Software Development Manager. Not a promotion, a bizarre 0.5% base raise, no new stock. As lateral as it could be.
June 2019: Another promotion document submitted, this time to L6 SDM instead of SDE. Another “no”. I was more confused this time because the case seemed solid and my manager was great. I don’t remember the exact feedback when it was rejected, but I think it was generally about direction setting/vision. The main difference here was that I sat down with my manager, and he went through point by point. What needed more data, what behaviors were missing or too weak, everything. We talked about what to do, how to get artifacts, and so on. I worked on these for a couple of months before going on paternity leave.
September 2019: I got back from paternity leave, got on a call with my manager, and he congratulated me on my promotion. I was pretty surprised because I’d maybe spent 4 weeks in the office after our conversation. He shared that the biggest data point was how I handled the rejection, and methodically worked through the feedback and made a plan to address them. Huh! Didn’t expect that. This was promotion #2.
Since then I’ve changed companies twice. The leveling at Amazon is about a half-level off other companies (Amazon’s Sr. SDE, L6, bridges Meta/Google L5 (Sr) and L6 (Staff)). As such, moving to Meta, then Google, at L6 was essentially a promotion. Since they were new offers, and their pay bands were higher than Amazon’s when I left, the pay increase was >50%. This was a self-promotion of sorts.
For those not keeping score themselves:
2 self-promotions moving companies
2 real promotions
2 lateral role changes
4+ failed promo attempts
6 companies