Promotion Q&A and Videos

I recently changed teams(been over 4 weeks). The current team did not have a manager/sr. engg manager to report to, and everyone reported to an Sr. director. This sr. director reported to a VP in my org. Unfortunately during a round of layoffs, our director got laid off. So, now imagine my team is "headless". Our VP did mention that they will try to bring in someone interim. Say that happens, and I am able to make a good connection with this "new" but temporary manager, but after a few months, we get a "permanent" manager, my questions and/or concerns around these are This would be my first time I will be in this situation mine is a tier-3 company, also not a tech-first company, is this how even Big Tech works? How do you all navigate this change, and continuous (non-technical) context switch of leadership? As you might have guessed how do I best make sure that my accomplishments(refers to the brag doc*) gets clearly communicated between my old manager, me, and my new manager? Does it make sense to even "talk" about getting promoted with the old manager if I have been on this team for 4 weeks? Re. to point 3, some notes about my accomplishments: I already was able to find bugs in their pipelines, and communicated about this to cross functional teams too, and everyone acknowledged this, and we have been able to avoid a major failure while shipping to prod environment, thereby saving us time(in months). What I am trying to say is I have been making(in my humble opinion) impact from day 1. I also am contributing to an internal library which will be used for onboarding several teams(cross regional too) in my company. I am the second developer on this repo. I already am keeping track about all of this in my "brag doc", I have been clearly communicating about my work with my scrum master, my current Principal Engineer, and other engineers. This is painful to write but, we have 3 engineers including me who are on the same level as mine(level 2), 1 Level-1, and 1 Principal Engg. Now, I am not comparing, but how do I put my best foot forward so that I too get a shot of pushing forward my promo packet along with others? There is a notion in my company(I dont know about Big Tech) that we "tend to" not have more than 2 level-3 engineers on a team, so should I just give up of not hoping to get promoted, and instead keep my head down and wait for new year or until I quit? Sorry if I sound negative, but its what it is. Some more information about me: YOE: 6+ this is what has been killing me from inside, 6+ yoe, and stuck on Level-2, I agree things were not hunky dory with me(been through a lot of personal s***), and couldn't focus on this side of my life. I agree this is my mistake, but I know myself, and I know I can make it work,I can push myself and make it work, but asking for a guidance is all. Appreciate you all for reading till the end, can't thank this community especially Rahul,and Alex.

Hi team, as per my current situation there are cycles for promotion in August and in Feb. I am targeting the Mid-Level title and was told to wait until next Feb for Mid-Level instead of coming August. I asked for data points and was told I needed more time to mature. I actually would have appreciated some actionable data points if there were any, so that I and my manager can track progress. I have the following 2 pointers : 1. On a personal front I want to aim for the promotion in Feb and want to let my manager know my intentions and pick up work accordingly however I don't know how to put it across. 2. I would have liked if there were some actionable data points to nail promotion since my manager didn't mention anything explicitly, and I have read and watched guidance about your career is in your hands so wanted to know how can I extract these pointers from my Manager? I ask these because 1:1's currently . And would have appreciated it if there were actual data points /action items Would highly appreciate insights from folks on the platform . Thank you :)

I'm currently SE2 in my company, which is the earlier side of mid-level and am trying to make progress to SE3 and then senior engineer. Knowing that, how can I start making headway towards that SE3 promo? Do I need to be able to draw the line between my work and business impact?

Recently I was watching Alex's excellent course about promotion, and to get promoted to the next level, it was essentially about acquiring an N+1 behaviour set. That got me thinking, instead of N+1, why don't I observe and emulate an N+X behaviour, so that I can get promoted to N+X level? If a Junior Engineer emulates a Staff Engineer behaviour set, won't he be promoted to Staff level at a rapid rate? (A Quadruple Promotion) Taking this example to the extreme, if an engineer in Meta emulates the behaviour set of Boz, won't he be promoted to CTO? Why or why not?

Hi all, recently during Q1 roadmapping I chose to move on to a new workstream from a growth/independence point of view as part of working my way up to E4. (My earlier effort was a 1->100, this one is 0->1 and was decided by me, my TL and EM together), and I had a couple of questions about this move. I have spent the past 6 months gaining context on a set of technologies and tools (internal to Meta) that perhaps only 2 other engineers on the team have context on. 1. Should I do a knowledge transfer session or write up a doc to ensure all the context I have doesn't get lost? 2. Should I allocate some time to supporting the team until I'm here on areas I gained context on? There is some possibility of scope thrash since I'm also long-term supporting one of the projects part of the earlier workstream (I delivered the v0 and have been making iterative but small changes since then). Should I talk to my manager about this? This is a very n00bish question: from a growth perspective, is it better to go 110% on the new workstream and all its nuances/open problems or go 80 and 20? As far as allocations go, I'm slated to be 100% on the new workstream as part of the roadmap. Bonus question: should I do a year-in-review/look-back post in tandem with my self review? (This is a very Meta-specific question in a way, but would love to hear other views too!)

I'm looking to get promoted to E4 in the next cycle, but I'm worried as my impact contribution isn't very clear. I've done a lot of work, but due to churn within my org (which includes a recent re-org), a good amount of my code isn't truly in production yet. I've documented my work in Quips and tasks to show that I did it, but I'm wondering if a lack of shipped impact will hold back my PSC.

I see some senior engineers getting promoted to staff within 2 years. Whereas other senior engineers take 5-7+ years. What are some hurdles that senior engineers face when getting promoted to staff engineer? How to watch out for and avoid these hurdles to get promoted within 2 years? What’s the biggest skill to start mastering or how to set yourself up for success at an early stage to make this promotion faster? Is it easier to get this promotion in big tech or a startup? Does changing teams or orgs or companies delay this promotion?

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!

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?

Just went through Rahul's amazing course on how to grow from L5 to L6. Excited to learn the different staff engineer archetypes that exist. I'm curious what your Staff Engineer archetype is. At what point in your career (and how) did you start identifying your archetype, and strengthening it? Once a staff engineer falls into an archetype, do they generally change over time, or do they fix on their archetype for the rest of their life?

I heard from Tech Career Growth sessions that promotion is a main indicator. Is that the best one or are there other ways to identify if you’re truly becoming a better software engineer?

How to identify my gap to next level? How to narrow my gap to next level?

As you climb up the career ladder (senior -> staff), this soft skill becomes more and more important. What are some ways I can keep honing it? Are there any professional courses I can consider? I would learn to be effective and efficient at it, specially in scenarios such as public speaking, team meetings, project status, emails etc. Also, English is not my first language.

I don't feel like I've grown as an engineer lately and it feels like I lack cool stories for promotion packages and behavioral interviews. I came to the conclusion that I don't get to work on projects with big enough scope. The last time I worked on something that made me feel like I was growing was a whole year ago. There was another good but slightly less significant task 5 months ago, but I had to come up with it myself out of boredom (all the other alternative projects/tasks felt weak by all 6 axes of scope from Alex's "Nail your promotion course"). I'm unsure, if in my teams we actually don't get meaningful work, if the issue is with my frame of mind, I just have not been bold enough to volunteer for exciting work. But I'm sure that it's worth bringing up with my manager. The only reason I hesitate to do it, is that I just got transferred to this team and assigned to my new manager one month ago. I feel like it may be too early for this kind of conversations, as I have not established myself enough. What do you guys think?

I joined Cisco Meraki like a year ago as a Sr. SWE and got promoted to a Technical Leader. I kinda did the role of a Technical Leader as a Sr. SWE like mentoring junior engs, doing lots of code reviews, keeping up the code quality, contributing to org wide projects and such. I learnt all these things from working for Meta as a L5. Now that i got a new "Title", i have a feeling that i should do something more and different - I am not sure if i should feel that way because this is the first time i am at this level in my career. I am wondering what i should do to keep up with the expectations. When i had this convo with my Manager, got some tips but all around, it was the same things what i did before but i got repeateadly said that expectations for a Technical Leader is going to be much higher than a Sr. SWE. I saw a whole bunch of youtube videos and blog post reg Technical Leader role but i kinda know that already, I am sure a bunch of engs already been through this already. Any advice would be super helpful.

Just got promoted to E5. I'm doing well in my product team and confident I’ll keep performing, but the technical learning is shallow. The work is more about organizing SWEs/XFNs, aligning stakeholders, and wearing multiple hats (PM, design, data eng, etc.). I’m good at this—soft skills have always been my strength. But the technical skills I’m gaining aren’t that "valuable." It’s mostly fullstack work relying on frameworks like React, which any decent developer can do. I feel like I’m missing out by not working on infra, where I could develop harder, more foundational skills (distributed systems, scalability, performance, reliability). These seem more transferable outside of Meta. The problem is, I struggled in infra before (short stint at a prior big tech company), while I’ve thrived in product. Not sure if I’d do well or just flop again—and now’s a bad time to underperform. Maybe I should be leaning on my strengths (soft skills) and accept the fact I don't have much of a technical edge for doing really well in Infra. I’m confident I can hit E6 in product, but will I get stuck there? Would switching to infra give me a better shot at E7+ and better opportunities outside Meta? Am I wrong?

The company faces significant challenges regarding quality and leadership, which permeate across various areas. For more detailed insights, please refer to this review. When the engineering manager lacks genuine skills and prioritizes people management over upskilling, promotions often favor those who conform and agree rather than those with genuine merit. I have encountered disparities in privileges, such as certain engineers receiving extended remote work due to vague health reasons while others face scrutiny for slower feature delivery without proper performance evaluations. My current resolve to stay stems primarily from the promise of an upcoming appraisal, although the specifics remain uncertain. However, the lack of clear project direction for the next six months is making me consider leaving. Despite this, I plan to stay for the next year, which is till April 25' - focusing on preparing post-appraisal for interview and system design. My strategy involves dedicating the last three months solely to working on the "the feature that can make me visible," and put bare minimum efforts, aligning my efforts with long-term goals in big tech opportunities.

Hi all, I joined Airbnb about 6 months ago and have been told by my manager that I'm doing superbly and that he seems me becoming one of the top people in my org. I don't think he's the type to over-embellish or say things that aren't true so I believe him. Given that, there's already a lot of strong senior and staff engineers in my team and org. How should I approach finding those juicier opportunities to make larger impacts outside of my immediate projects? I'm one of the most productive engineers on my team right now but finding those high-leverage and larger impact projects on my own has always been challenging for me. I'm not an ideas person but I'm a solid executor. Recently, I've been on a really large project that was simply handed to me and one that I'm not leading that's taken up the entire company's time but after this is all over, I'd like to start brainstorming and executing on some of these more unique and high-impact projects that can help me become a Staff engineer. I want to get into a position where I'm driving high-impact projects that ideally I come up with. Would appreciate some advice on how to approach my current situation and work towards this goal. Thanks!

Background I have nearly 8 years of experience including internships. Last 7-8 years I was working in fast faced companies and Startups. This is my Day 4 at my new company as SSE. Issues: In hiring manager round, he informed me that its not customer facing team but horizontal team which is needed for the company. In intro meeting, when i asked about home office setup, he said that u can take it if needed but anyway there won't be big code to view in monitor. My team is not customer facing team and we won't be using actual data of customers. Its just internal team for internal employees ### Current Situation All engineers are new. We all have similar years of experience We have 1-2 staff engineer for the entire org. Getting married in next 6 weeks. So can't do job shift again immediately. ### Question My expectation before joining here is to become Staff software engineer in next 1 and half years by following everything mentioned in Taro. but looking at current work and team I'm confused about my next steps. How should I approach this situation? What should I do to become staff software engineer here? Should I leave the company? I suspect team shift can be possible at this moment.

I have been making progress towards meeting senior level competencies. My manager is aligned and wants to put me up for promo at the end of the year. However, I’m looking for a third project in Q4 to really nail down my case. Additionally, I want to provide more impact and learn how to define new initiatives. I love creating “swim lanes” for my teammates and leading projects that grow their scope. How would you recommend: Coming up with a project idea Vetting the project to make sure it has enough scope for a senior level (or staff! I would love to provide more impact) Vetting the project to make sure it has enough impact for a senior level I have a lot of ideas for step 1, but am struggling to choose which are appropriate to pursue. Previously, I built a reusable web component at a company wide scale, and am working with a cross org team who wants to use it. I am also working on a technically complex web authentication project that has potential to be used by other teams. Both of these project were scoped by me (with some guidance from my staff mentor) and my manager has communicated they are senior level projects. I have built good relationships with my teammates, our direct stakeholders, and several cross-org engineers. I’m also exceeding expectations at my current level, so there isn’t anything to worry about there. However, I feel like I’m hitting a wall and need to figure out the next project that will turn my promo case into a slam dunk. Any advice? I’m a frontend web engineer if that helps. :)

I recently read an existing question "Do FAANG...ever hire M1 from outside?" I am aware that M1 is usually filled internally. The part that shocked me is that the questioner stated they are a Sr EM with 10 years of management experience. I would expect they would interview for Tier 1 as a Sr EM with that background. This relates to my own career strategy as well: I plan to move from Sr IC to EM at my current company, gain 2-5 years of experience, and consider interviewing out for promo if I can't achieve internal promo in that frame. Am I thinking about this the wrong way? We know promo to senior for engineers by interviewing is often easier than internal promo, but is that a poor mental model for EM?

Hi all, hope you're all doing well! TLDR: Is it possible to get promoted from L3 to L4 by changing FAANG companies? Context: Currently 1.3YOE Exp as FAANG SWE at L3/fresh graduate Level 9 months of prior experience as a graduate SWE at a non-FAANG company Work Environment Extremely high workload+stress: 60-85+ hours per week (everyone on the team works these hours so it's not a question of my inefficiency) Consistent weekend work required to meet deadlines Unrealistic expectations, tight estimations and tighter deadlines. Management unwilling to adjust timelines or provide additional resources - results in employees working on sick leave, solving user issues on PTO etc. No senior engineers in my team working within 40 hr/wk, I say this to paint the picture of the working env for people who are 'well settled' into the job. I'd go on but hope this gives an idea. My Performance Exceeds expectations in all categories. Gained significant experience due to the high project throughput. Taking ownership of multiple features. Go-to person for user issues related to certain features. System design experience for small to mid-sized projects. Questions/Concerns: Is promo from L3 -> L4 in FAANG by moving companies, even possible? What should I say if the recruiter asks me for my current job level? - I don't want to be down-levelled if I disclose my current L3 level. - However, I don't want to be dishonest either. What if a recruiter reaches out to my current company to ask about my level? What parts of my experience can I highlight to show I'm performing at the L4 level? Closing thoughts: By the time I prep for interviews and likely land a job I'll probably have 1.7yrs of FAANG exp (L3) and 9 months of non FAANG exp. Hopefully, this is enough for a L4 promo. Ideally, I don't want to grind my health down for a promo. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Awesome platform by the way, it's really helped in my career development and I can't express how grateful I am for Taro :)

How can I enhance my soft skills, particularly in navigating leadership challenges? As someone from India for whom English is not the first language, I aim to transition into a senior or staff-level role. Building rapport with peers and juniors is essential for me, but I'm unsure how to foster personal relationships in the workplace. Are there any recommended books on this topic?

Rahul used to say that Growth is the solution to all problems. If the company and the team is growing, then you get promotions much faster. But, currently, I guess other than AI teams, literally every other team in big tech seems to be shrinking. Due to the AI tools, lesser employees can produce the same output. There are too many layoffs in the last 2 years. Do you think this trend of shrinking companies will continue as AI tools keep evolving? Does this mean promotions become much harder and will take much longer for non-AI folks? For someone struggling to get promoted in big tech, do you recommend moving to startups for faster promotion? Does being promoted to L5 and L6 in startups have a similar value as in big tech?