[noduerme]

Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.

Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.

So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).

See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.

[naveen99]

Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease.

Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.

[esprehn]

> Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.

While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...

The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.