2

Interviewing and joining a higher level in career ladder

Profile picture
Senior Software Engineer at Grab2 years ago

If your organisation is not promoting you, what can be the possible reasons? Does it make sense for one to join another organisation at a higher level or is it a recipe for failure?

81
1

Discussion

(1 comment)
  • 1
    Profile picture
    Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
    2 years ago

    If your organisation is not promoting you, what can be the possible reasons?

    Here's a bunch off the top of my head:

    1. You're not performing well enough (obvious).
    2. The promotion is very lagging - This video covers this concept in-depth.
    3. Your org has a promotion cap (only X amount of people can be promoted each cycle), and other engineers took the slots for whatever reason.
    4. Your manager doesn't like you.
    5. Your company just under-levels people in general. A lot of companies are pretty infamous for this: Google and Amazon come to mind, particularly with their L4/SDE 2 promotion to L5/SDE 3.

    Does it make sense for one to join another organisation at a higher level or is it a recipe for failure?

    I assume by "organisation" you mean company. It would be a bit weird to switch within your company at a higher level. That being said, it depends - If you're currently under-leveled, you could be fine. But if you're fairly leveled and you negotiate an up-level switching companies, especially if it's a high-performance company like FAANG, this could easily be a recipe for disaster. Level expectations are not standardized, so it's hard to tell whether you would meet expectations at your new higher level at a new company. It's all pretty anecdotal - I have a "tier list" of companies mentally within my head based on my experience and what I've heard/seen from colleagues.

Grab Holdings Inc., commonly known as Grab, is a Singaporean multinational technology company. It is the developer of the Grab super-app, which provides users with transportation, food delivery and digital payments services via a mobile app.
Grab28 questions