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While these are often useful for setting some internal guidelines for promotions, I've found such an approach to usually end up creating a giant inverse bell, where one side of the curve is constrained by the framework while the other side gamifies it. In the middle, there is a few folks that actually pass the bar organically, and those usually end up being the best hires. Why? Well, one side is often constrained by the red tape.
i.e. "Oh for this promotion you have to define and deliver technical roadmaps of larger projects, we don't see you having done that in the last 6 months.", meanwhile the person is assigned to a team where their lead specifically does these things and will not be provided a chance to do it, or they have another person on the team vying for the same position which will jump on the task. This leads to people being stuck in the same level for a while, until they decide to jump ship because there is less energy required to jump to/into that level in another company than it is to untangle the red tape at their current place. The other group gamifies the system as much as possible. While one could say that is a good thing (no project to lead? create one!), it often ends up with folks doing fluff work just to show it off on their promotion review, coming up with project that will be left to die as soon as they get that jump or overestimating the value of their current work and impact, i.e.: "now see, that event notification _notification_ delivery service topology I was working on the last 3 months was super important because there is a percentage of cases where they were not delivered on time, which is terrible, right? but our event notification delivery microservice doesn't deal with that, so now that we have an established topology we can architecture a backing service to pre-notify us of misdelivered messages and be sure it will work." (Jim, developer in a series A startup with 200 users) While there is excellence hidden here sometimes (great operators will do whatever the hell they think needs to be done, red tape or not), often times it is just political grifting, trying to one-up the system to get into a position of more power/money/influence. These folks usually end up creating more red tape to constraint others from doing the same, or burn the bridges while they cross them, causing impact to the company (wasted time, wasted money, wasted code) for their own gain. For non-experienced people, recognizing these is often hard, while even for the experienced ones fighting them is quite hard too, as they are playing the system and will use it to their defense. |