[joschmo]

One of the few things I appreciated about finance was how clear the hierarchy system was. 3 years as an analyst, 3 as an associate, 3 as a VP, 3-5 as a director with promotion to managing director based on hitting clearly defined fee generation markers, and then an eat-what-you-kill model as a managing director with a clear % take rate on what you brought in.

And banks have accelerated the early years path to compete with tech and private equity by including accelerated 2-year paths at the analyst and associate levels for top bucket performers. Now these banks are still hemorrhaging junior talent now more than ever, but that's probably more of a function of lifestyle (80-100 weeks for your first 5-6 years before things start settling down).

The review cycles are generally okay (not good by any stretch) but manage to capture whether or not someone's impact is outsized and worth accelerating. So a great job of finding the 8-10/10s but pretty poor at delineating between 4-7s.

Not possible to use that model in engineering organizations (at least the ones I've seen) because there isn't an apprenticeship model in tech as in finance so it is harder to promote a 7/10 performer every 3 years reliably because they may not be capable of doing the next job due to specialization and less linear skillset building.