Promotions: Going slow to go fast
An extremely common source of anxiety among tech workers is “when will I get promoted” or “why did this colleague get promoted before me”. And it doesn’t help that the Internet is full of stories of super fast promos, e.g. the mythical stories of a new grad becoming a staff engineer in 3 years, Director in another 2, VP in another one, CEO before being born, etc.
My own experience is quite different. It took me nearly 4 years to get my first promo. Initially I wasn’t being very productive nor working hard; I wrote a lot of code, but no impact. Obsessed with landscape photography, I’d bring my camera to work and leave for photo-walks most days after work. That’s where my heart and mind was at, which further impacted productivity.
In fact, for the longest time I didn’t realize I had to provide actual value to the company’s bottomline. It was early-mid days of Google, which felt like an idealistic playground for big baby engineers, shielded from reality. Thus, in the initial years, I didn’t even fully grok that my salary was in exchange for some service of monetary value, even if indirect.
Two years in, it took a bad rating, a project shutdown, and some tough feedback to realize I was squandering a good opportunity. I had to quickly find another team within Google. This led to a critical phase of introspection; why was the project shutdown? why were *all* my lines of my code deleted? why did I get a poor rating? What could I’ve done better? How do I make up for the lost years? I was ‘growing up’, so to speak, learning not only how to be a more effective engineer, but how to tie my work to the company’s business, how to raise alarms early, and how to communicate this outward and upward.
To this day, I benefit from this early slowness. A period of intense learning and growing, despite it taking 4 years to get a promo. In fact every subsequent promo has taken less time than the previous one.
Assuming a 30–35 year career, 3–4 years is just 10%. Mathematically, you’re optimizing for the area under curve (AUC) of some success metric over your full career. The green line starts slow but wins over the red line in the long run, as long as Y > X.
Tortoise vs. Hare. Going slow to go fast. You name it.
In the formative years, quick promos give a head start, but there could be downsides — over-optimizing for promo bar at one company could be suboptimal; you might learn to ‘hack’ the process there, but unable to meet the expectations of the new level at other companies in the future. Promos are often impact-driven, and not necessarily a reward for holistic growth.
If you’re helplessly waiting for a promo, consider not obsessing over it. There are many factors beyond your control — budget, timing, politics, sponsors. It’s not going to be easy; we all love instant gratification. but better to harvest that anxiety to learn and grow to maximize AUC over your full career.
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I’m mentoring: https://lnkd.in/deZm3R4B
