As a manager, how do you balance promotion needs of your direct reports?
Suppose you are a manager and have 15 direct reports. 7 of them are pretty strong mid level engineers and are all looking for senior promotions. Realistically, promoting even 5 of them within a year would result in too many senior engineers on the team. Additionally, there are organizational concerns about having too many senior engineers on one team. How would you handle this situation to maintain balance?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
3 months agoStaff Eng @ Google, Ex-Meta SWE, Ex-Amazon SDM/SDEBalancing the promotion portfolio for this many people isn’t very sustainable. If your team has the scope of work for 5 senior engineers, but there is organizational pressure to have mid-level people doing senior level work instead of rewarding that with promotion, the organization is badly broken. If there simply isn’t that much senior-level scope, then the strong mid-level engineers seeking promotion need to be told they need to move on to another team that has scope and few engineers able to take it on.
I might have longer term succession plans, seeing if any engineers prefer moving to a management role, and devolving the team into 2-3 smaller groups. 2-3 role changes to a “training wheels” manager, with intention to promote to “full” manager equivalent to a senior engineer, then 3-4 senior promotions, with one per team (with the current manager continuing to own deliverables and direct engineers). This structure turns this over-large team into a small org (I would imagine backfilling engineers into the spaces vacated by engineer to manager role changes over time). This would allow better focus (I hope a team that size has multiple features in-flight, etc.), and clearer ownership.
On a team of 5, I’d expect one senior promotion in a year, assuming there are none already on that team. Extending that to 15 (assuming 3 significant areas of ownership), I would say 3 could be possible if the manager had a lot of support in getting feedback, writing docs, etc. 7 seems absurd. If you’re asking how they pick the 3… well, that’s tough. Mostly it’s based on self-motivation, and gap analysis. Telling someone a target for promotion that really isn’t reasonable with their gaps is a setup for major unrest.
- 03 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
As a manager, I would focus my efforts on the strongest performers and ensuring that they are taken care of.
VP of Eng David Pan talks about this here: How Managers Split Their Time Between High/Medium/Low Performers
I'd be clear with everyone about their realistic chances of getting promoted given the business needs for only having so many senior engineers.
