So what happens when you get promoted and are not qualified for the job? What happens to their reports that have to deal with an unqualified manager? What happens with the organization?
I work in a half technical (hands on development)/half customer facing role in BigTech - cloud consulting.
I was a software developer mostly working at small companies until 2020. There were never any promotion guidelines and I knew to make more money I needed to job hop.
For context: a “work stream” is a series of task meant to achieve an outcome. Depending on the complexity of a project, it can have multiple work streams.
The expectations are for the first 3 levels are:
An L4: you’re expected to be able to gather requirements from a customer and understand their business needs for one work stream. Help implementing a solution and present the solution to the customer. If you can’t demonstrate that you can do that as an intern, you won’t get a return offer.
The problem is well defined. You are not expected to design the solution without help.
L5: You should be able to do what the L4 does and lead a work stream, design the solution, implement it, and manage your own work and customer delivery.
The problem is mostly defined (ie low ambiguity). You are expected to be able to define the solution.
L6: All of the requirements of an L5. But you should be able to manage multiple work streams in a project and here the problem is not well defined (high ambiguity).
At each level it is about increasing “scope” and “impact”. Do you suggest someone be promoted without proving they work at the next level? How will that affect the customer?
Just because you’re good at taking orders when everything is spoon fed to you (L4) doesn’t mean you can design and manage an implementation. Are you going to let an L4 with no demonstrated skill loose on your AWS account? Be responsible for your HIPAA compliant implementation?
An L5 that can handle their work well, show a deep technical understanding and can manage their workstream is not necessarily good at managing multiple related work streams (more scope), nor does it mean they can handle pre-sales work unassisted (high ambiguity).
> You learn it as you go. Like some of the most succesful managers and CEOs to ever be.
And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
And who are they going to “learn” from and what happens to the company as they are learning? What do you think happens to a department consisting of in demand developers when they get an incompetent manager?
Even though I mostly worked at small companies before working at BigTech, I did work at one at the time F10 non tech company from 2012-2014. An incompetent manager who was good technically got promoted. Within 6 months his entire team of 14 left.
>And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
There's something fishy about how developers continue to demonstrate the ability to write/ship software but they don't get regular raises, but it works differently for managers/execs for some reason. This and the poaching agreements are why we have job hopping as the primary lifting force of compensation.
It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work: that L6 pay doesn't scale with output/revenue impact.
It should actually be the opposite because managerial badness might happen in big bangs (whole team leaving) or very obvious red flags (abusive shitbags), but developers have access to a lot more objective information that could be used to drive promotion decisions, but that still doesn't happen.
> There's something fishy about how developers continue to demonstrate the ability to write/ship software but they don't get regular raises
They do, there is an L4 to at least L7 track as an IC in BigTech and even on the corporate dev side, you can job hop your way from $80K to $170K in most major cities in the US within 8 years of starting your career.
> It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work
I didn’t mean to imply that an L6 is doing the same type of work, as a purposeful L5 I likes being able to deep dive on one “work stream” from requirements, to implementation to handover.
An L6 wouldn’t be putting in more hours they would be coordinating the work of multiple L5s. They aren’t doing more work, they are doing different work. Their contribution is valuable. But someone has to be in the trenches doing the work.
>And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
I don't know, most of them? Most companies have their founders as their CEOs until they become very successful, and these are their first gigs as CEOs of a big company, right?
Weren’t you talking about promoting people without them proving themselves? At what level should they need to prove themselves before getting a promotion.