Tech Career Promotions

Only advice I can give you is pick your team/company very carefully. Choosing the right team can open up promotion opportunities that other teams might not have. Half the battle is putting yourself in the right situation. Also, big promotions commonly go to people that have lasted a long time in some organization. I saw people at FAANG spend a decade in one organization, then finally get recognition and ended up a few levels higher in a quick fashion. The people you spoke to were laughing b

I'm going to be honest here and say you're like the best person for the job you have. The guy who got VP? He's a more qualified manager than you. The guy who does support? He's got 8 years experience and a masters degree. You? You're the best developer they have. This practice is even more common in enterprise. I worked in tech for the largest company on the planet (take a guess) and it was routine to find the best developer was as most a team lead, never management. HR

Yes. That's really common when someone very senior at a FAANG wants to achieve a greater level of autonomy and "impact". Once you hit L5/L6 at Google/Facebook (or equivalent elsewhere), the promotion rate slows down quite a lot. So one option to continue career growth is to jump ship for a smaller (but promising) tech company in exchange for more responsibility and a title increase.

This is very wise:"When I was at GM, you were a failure if your next move was not up—managing more people or taking on bigger, more complex projects. For many, this made for a miserable career path"As I've said before, I think this is a corrosive aspect of the perf/promo process at many FAANGs. The "level" system encourages/pushes people to "upgrade" in this manner, and I think contributes to a number of problems. For one, organizational incompe

They are not necessarily wrong. The most straightforward way to grow into the role you want (e.g. a manager) is to get direct experience doing the job. For example, if you wanted to get a manager role at a FAANG-type of company, you could:1. Get a role as a junior developer at a FAANG, get 2+ promotions, hope your team has enough scope and resources to let you try out manager duties2. Get a role as a junior developer at a growing company, be quickly forced into manager duties, then transfe

I've found there are two really tough and visible dividing lines in a typical tech company: 1. the line between individual contributor (IC) and first level manager and 2. the line between the top managers and the executive class (directors, VPs, etc). These two lines define the three basic tech castes: ICs, managers and execs. While it's pretty straightforward to be promoted internally within these castes, it's difficult to jump from one to another, particularly from "

The answer is because promotions depend on growing your org. This is extremely common in big tech and known as empire building. You’d be hard pressed to find a company where this isn’t the case.

Indeed becoming a tech lead or manager comes through being part of the company most of the times. Which sometimes is a terrible practice because being employee #3, 5, 10, etc. and staying there for 5-10 years does not mean you are a good leader or manager. Not to mention that in most companies it is also impossible to move higher in the ladder with all the internal politics, "friendships" and significant lack of proper management.

It is a promotion, I agree, at least at most companies. They usually have a single ladder and many times from senior engineer there is nowhere to go except management.Some companies, however, do recognize the need for multiple ladders, so you can also be promoted within engineering, with a salary that is higher than middle management.It is a problem, if you switch then to a company that does not have multiple ladders, though.

This is the case in my company. My boss reluctantly went to the manager track as it was quite difficult to move up on the SDE track (from the level he was on) but much easier on the manager track.