[mtlynch]

Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading!

I largely agree with you.

I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion.

My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.

I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale.

I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.

[skulk]

> My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.

oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably pointed this out to you early.

[mtlynch]

Yeah, I found a mentor at the beginning of year 4, and they were very helpful. There were a lot of things happening on my team that I didn't understand, and my mentor was able to recognize them as political patterns that were somewhat common.

I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I could get promoted without thinking much about career strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of my career had worked out.

After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years, and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted after a year and was on track for more.

One of the big differences in other companies was that they gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to day work rather than needing to see me launch something big and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to prove measurable results to an external promo committee.