Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

This advice is not wrong, but honestly it could be way more cynical.

The first step to get promoted is to understand the promotion process of your current company, if they have a formal one. It took me one year to learn how promos work in my current company, and that was one whole year of progress lost.

Then if you really want to get promoted fast, you need to optimize to meet the promo criteria. Often that is in line with OP advice, sometimes it is against it. And above all, learn about scope, impact and visibility. Also learn about optics and politics. Sadly often promotions are not so much about your accomplishments, but how you present them and how people perceive them. The old advice of "work really hard and you will be rewarded" is moot if the right people don't know about it. Some people get promoted faster by doing less but promoting themselves harder and louder.

Even if you don't want to exactly game the system, it is still useful to know how it is played. For example, if you accomplish some extraordinary, spend a bit of effort letting higher ups know about it.

> Then if you really want to get promoted fast, you need to optimize to meet the promo criteria.

This gets repeated all the time, but it’s easy to overdo it.

It’s true that you’re not going to get promoted if you don’t meet the promotion criteria, so you have to meet the criteria if you want to move up.

However, I’m seeing more and more juniors who think promotion criteria are some game they’re going to min-max, and that I have to promote them if they check certain boxes. They do weird things like ignore their assigned work and spend all their time working on a high-visibility side project, or ignore the way work is assigned and try to do only the things they see as promotion-worthy. Or other times they’re just difficult to work with, unliked by their peers, and avoided by people who don’t want to deal with their politics. Then they can’t understand why we didn’t promote them to team lead despite their work on that one high-profile thing earlier this year.

If you play it too much like a game, it’s obvious and starts to backfire. If you go fully cynical on the process, it’s almost guaranteed to backfire. I’ve seen some people included in layoffs mostly because their constant promotion-seeking competitiveness turned into pervasive toxicity and everyone was looking for the first opportunity to remove them.

Maybe at some companies the pure game theory mode works out, but you have to build relationships and be a good person to work with. At some point, the “game theory” approach just looks like “do a good job and make relationships in the process”.

> “do a good job and make relationships in the process”

Exactly! Do a generally good job; don't be an asshole; read the promotion rubric, but don't read it every day; it's far more important to understand what the strategy of your team/org/division is and work towards that.

Oh yes this happens all the time!

Last year an engineer in my org got promoted to Senior Staff. In order to get there he alienated and burnt out many other engineers, including me.

But guess what? he got the promotion, which is what he was gunning for, and he only alienated his peers. Leadership still support him and think he is a genius (BTW for doing things like taking credit from others). Also he seems to have chilled down a lot since the promo, so if you only interacted with him afterwards you would have a very different opinion of him.

There is this idea that tech is a small world, your fame will precede you and such, but in practice I have seen the opposite. It seems way too easy to outrun your mistakes, either by changing teams or companies. I guess that is why it is relatively common to switch companies right after a promo. I have seen not so brilliant people greatly exaggerate their accomplishments and jump to greater highs.

They say that you can't fool all the people all the time, but that framing is wrong. You only need to fool the right people long enough. And in tech, long enough seems to be 2-3 years, after which you can jump ship and rinse and repeat.

I don't know about your company, but in mine executives never get fired. They always "leave for new and exciting opportunities" or "to spend more time with their families". I remember reading an article from an entrepreneur saying that a high % of executive hires are duds, but this is often kept under wraps to save face for both the company and the executive.

Bottom line, min-maxing your career progress *can* backfire, but statistically you'll be ahead by doing it than not. And you can minimize the downside by outrunning your mistakes, moving to other teams or companies (this applies less with the current job market).

don't game the system, make the system

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