I have 2.5 years of experience and working as an L3 engineer at Snap. To give you a bit more context about the structure of my team, We have 2 L3s, 2 L4s and 1 L5 in the team.
We just had our half yearly performance review.
The review I got from my manager for the half yearly performance reviews was “exceeds expectations”. Clearly, I am a high performer, and in any other case, having 2.5 years of experience, I would be looking at a promotion in the next 6months-1year.
However, the other L3 in the team got “redefines expectations” in his performance review.
We have same years of experience. He is a better engineer than me. He manages projects better than me, his output delivery is faster than me, he’s really good at writing technical docs as well as communicating stuff to the important stakeholders. There is no debate as to who is the better software engineer in team.
My question is, how much having him in the team affects the speed of growth from my career ? I am completing 3 years of experience soon and want to get promoted to L4. However I don’t see any situation where I am promoted before him, and I worry that this means delay of my promotion considering he'd be promoted before me and we already have many L4s in the team.
Am I overthinking this? I just want to know if switching companies or teams would be more beneficial for me than waiting in this team. Should I discuss about this with my manager ? While he is very focussed on making sure that the teams does well, I don't get the feeling from him that he cares too much about my professional growth.