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This Is What A Good Promotion Plan Looks Like

One of the most crucial ingredients for a successful promotion is a clear plan. However, the engineering career matrix that most big companies have isn't nearly enough. This video covers what a quality promotion plan looks like.

Here are the core points from the video:

  • Show the delta - Just giving someone a concept isn't enough. Growth comes when you progress from a lower state to a higher one. To best facilitate that, you must outline exactly what that lower state and higher state are so people can understand the difference and work towards bridging the gap.
  • Here's an example showing what it means to outline the delta when growing a mid-level engineer on their code review axis:
    • Bad promotion plan: "Have a bigger influence in code review"
    • Good promotion plan:
      • E4 (mid-level): "You are extremely thorough catching issues within your own domain, finding architectural issues (sometimes challenging the entire diff/diff stack), performance problems, and several edge case misses."
      • E5 (senior): "Instead of mainly reviewing stack-specific diffs within product domains you have worked on, you review diffs across the entire stack for your org (M2+ scope). You are able to review diffs for areas that you have never worked with before, quickly absorbing the context of the diff and its surrounding ecosystem to leave genuinely insightful feedback in a relatively short period of time.”

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