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Promotion Q&A and Videos

About Promotion

The clearest way a company can acknowledge your growth. At the end of the day, you can't solely interview your way to a principal engineer; promotion is the true foundation of your pay and career.

How do I get a Senior SWE promotion if I work at a client based company where projects change every few months and my manager is the same age as me (26)?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hello!

I used to work for a large fin tech company but recently got a job at a client-based company. They flew me into the office for an onboarding week and the culture and people are fantastic. I even made a decision to move from DC into the Houston office just cause of the people and weirdly I realized that my personality is a bigger asset than I realized. I enjoy chatting with people, and a Director of Product even told me "I don't usually hold 1:1s with the new folks but your personality was shining so bright!"

I only give this info cause I'm not very confident in my technical skills. While I got a great performance review in my last company, it was because of my determination, my willingness to go full stack when no one wanted to, and cause I was very close with the Product and Design team. Tbh that's also cause I don't really nerd out about state management or the newest framework or whatever like everyone else seems to. I enjoy frontend cause I like making pretty things and that's it. I'm not the person who is constantly thinking about how to make our testing process or pipelines better. I can learn those things if I need to but it doesn't come naturally to me.

I have admitted some of this to folks at my new company and they've been super cool about it. They even suggested I dabble into a Technical PM role. That's still something I'm chewing on cause while it's silly, I love typing things on my pretty little IDE and I like fewer meetings. But I don't imagine coding forever. In my company, a senior engineer gets to lead a project, manage people, and talk to clients. I'm aiming for a senior role cause I think it aligns more with my natural skill sets as I believe my soft skills are stronger than my technical skills.

My manager became a senior recently and told me it was because he was willing to do whatever client project came in whatever language that was required. He's the same age as me and only started coding 3 years ago after a BootCamp. This is his only company but I'll admit, I feel like he's a stronger engineer than I am. I've been in the company for a few weeks, and I've been getting my stories done quickly even though their tech stack is new (but everyone is fast) but I'm not sure how to even become a Senior since I don't know if I will be able to become the rockstar engineer that my manager is. I will move earliest in September so I'm remote until then. Projects also come and go so fast. Any ideas on how to standout?

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Worked with manager for promotion, but he suddenly got laid off. How to navigate?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at PowerSchool profile pic
Mid-Level Software Engineer at PowerSchool

I read and implemented a lot of the advice from Taro on building my relationship with my manager. I also worked closely with him for a year to position myself for the promotion to Senior. Every two weeks, I would meticulously document senior behavior in my "brag document" that I shared with him through Microsoft OneNote. Every month during our 1:1, I would ask him for feedback on what I needed to continue doing or change to reach Senior. During performance review each quarter, I used all of this to officially document my growth, and secured 3 Exceeds with 1 Meets. By the end of Q4, he was primed to go to bat for me.

Then he suddenly got laid off a month or two before names are submitted up the chain of command for promotion. I imagine others might have or will encounter a similar situation. In addition to layoffs, company reorganization or your manager jumping into another opportunity might have similar effects.

It feels like so much of my effort over the past year was futile. What makes this sting even more is that I'm fully aware of my company's promotion cycle, which is once a year in March/April. Promotions rarely happen outside this cycle.

What are some tactics to navigate this current situation and a strategy to avoid this single point of failure in the future?

Here's what I've done so far

  • Reached out to manager on LinkedIn to console him on layoffs. Fortunately he brought up the topic of my promotion and advised me to pass along a message to my next manager that we were working together on my promotion.
  • My company is still undergoing reorg, and I don't have an official manager yet, so reached out to his manager, which is the Director. The "brag document" in OneNote came in handy since I shared it with him and passed along the message from my manager
  • Started looking at other companies for senior roles. It's difficult to bear the thought of starting over from square one with a new manager within my current company and waiting a whole other year.

Here's my thoughts around strategy moving forward

  • Maybe work with manager's manager, in addition to the direct manager, for promotions. Would work more closely with direct manager, but at least touch base with manager's manager once a quarter regarding the promo.
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Promotion Level Project?

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Data Engineer at Taro Community

I'm at a company where we are migrating from AWS to Snowflake due to Snowflake's simplicity and cost savings.

The Team responsible for the migration and in charge of Snowflake is led by a guy who is difficult to work with. He's not unpleasant, but if he gets you on the phone, he loves to talk and take up a ton of time. I was literally on a call with him for 2 hours yesterday because he goes off on tangents and likes to hear himself talk. He also has a bit of an accent which makes it harder to understand him.

So he's a Director and leader of that team and I'm a Data Engineer on an adjacent team. As part of the migration to Snowflake, he had the company agree to license a piece of 3rd party software to move data into Snowflake. This piece of software is one that none of the Engineers in the department want to use: it's old, closed-source, no one knows it and is a dead-end on a resume. On top of that, I'm pretty sure it's completely unnecessary! I think Snowflake provides a way of getting data into it that works as well. The biggest thing is the cost! It's a whopping percentage of our cloud spend!

This director had a good relationship with the VP of my department (my former skip) who was the one who signed off on the 3rd-party software but recently left. I was discussing the situation with a colleague today and realized that since my former skip is no longer around, I could potentially make the case to my new skip, which could earn my plaudits. It's an easy way to save the company a pile of money every year (multiples of my salary).

So I'm thinking of doing a POC of how I can replace the 3rd-party. I mentioned this to my manager today, and he said we already have a 3 year contract with the vendor. I think he's resigned to the idea that we're locked in for 3 years.

If I can reproduce the functionality of the 3rd party software (just bringing in data into Snowflake), should I make the case to my new skip (who doesn't know me yet)? I'm assuming I should go through my manager first.

Should I try and share the credit with my coworkers who also don't want to use the 3rd party and would probably back me up?

Thanks!

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Should I join an important project with difficult team mates or a not so important project with great team mates?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

I was lucky to join a very competent and lovely platform team when I joined my current company. I have been working in the same team for 18 months but due to re-orgs people have moved out and we are currently 3 people and we were 9 people when we started out.

We have been doing mostly maintenance work for the past 3 months after re-orgs and recently we were given a choice to work on two projects.

There is one project, lets call it Project Hero which my skip level manager wants me to join. I would be the main PIC for this project and it will involve a lot of integration work and system design. This project is with new team mates and a new manager with whom I have not worked but they don't have the best reputation. However, going by FAANG level, they should be good enough to get the job done. Only downside is work-life balance might be skewed if I join here. However, if the project is a success, it sets me up for Senior level promotion.

There is another project, lets call it Project Nero. This will be with my existing team but from a company perspective, it's not a very important project. But I will be working with my existing team mates who are both capable of delivering a solid project and a joy to work with. However, my work here will be overshadowed by other Senior engineers on the project.

Which project should I join? I personally want to do Project Hero but not with the people present there. Also it will be challenging.
Project Nero will be challenging also but more up my comfort zone.
Given the current economic climate, I feel being in more important teams will help keep my job.

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What would a roadmap to make a transition from Junior to Mid-level look like?

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Associate Member of Technical Staff at Taro Community

Hi Taro Community!

I am in a very similar position as mentioned by someone here: and from the responses it is evident that switching teams/companies will be an unavoidable step soon. I am currently at an entry-level position (will be completing 6 months at current company soon) and wish to look for roles at the next level of hierarchy (for instance my current role is equivalent to SDE 1, I wish to look for roles similar to SDE 2 or equivalent next). Few points:

  • I am planning to complete 1 year at my current company, so by the time I switch I shall have ~1 yr of experience as an entry-level software engineer (apart from other experiences as internships/side projects/etc.)
  • Firstly, is it realistic to prepare for mid-level at the current position? Do companies hire entry-level SWE's with at most 1 yr of experience for mid-level?
  • If yes, is it advisable to apply now (or 6 months down the line)? I do not wish to work as an SDE-1 (entry-level) in another company by leaving my current one as it will only lead to further delays in promotions (I believe it takes at least a few months to set a good impression in a new team that you are capable for a promotion)
  • How can I best utilize the next 6 months before I aggressively start applying to companies? I understood the point related to side projects - is it advisable to build side projects in the tech stack my team is using, or should I expand my scope to include new technologies I am interested (but not actively working on right now)?

Any insights/suggestions/interview tips will be really appreciated. I have very less workload right now and really want to make the best use of time to switch further.

Thank you!

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Is it normal for a company to track performance related metrics and use it as input for promos/bonuses?

Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community

The company I work for started tracking a wide range of metrics related to our day-to-day work (with an external tool called LinearB). It integrates with pretty much everything to collect as many metrics as possible such as lines of code, number of PRs, size of PRs, time spent on reviewing, cycle time, time spent in meetings, etc. These tools feel like they only aim to gather as many metrics as physically possible, but do not always manage to put them into context. For example if you go on holiday or sick leave, all your metrics go down (for obvious reasons).

Personally I feel some of these metrics are straight up toxic and I also see that many people in our company started feeling paranoid about this and feeling an urge to “game” the metrics so their numbers look good.

The reason for this is that initially we were told the metrics are only going to be used on a team level, but now we are getting strong signals that this is used on the individual level as input for things like determining promos, raises, bonuses, etc. I know that there are standards and best practices to follow (like having small, meaningful PRs), but using these metrics as a signal for perfomance feel stupid, because it depends so much on the type of work I do. One week I'm debugging a production incident and it may be resolved with a single line config change, the other week I'm writing tons of unit tests, etc.

We were told that this whole thing is pretty much industry standard and very common at big companies like FAANG. Is that really so? If yes, could you elaborate on how is it implemented and how do you deal with the stress associated with trying to maximize your metrics (which may not be a direct consequence of "getting the work done", so you have to do extra just to increase your metrics).

Really appreciate all you inputs. Thanks.

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