Promotion Q&A and Videos

Hello Taro community,

I hope you're all doing well. I have a question and would greatly appreciate your insights and guidance.

Background: I joined the company last year (ex-FAANG) as an L5 level and have been actively involved in developing internal tooling for a new product. Recently, while exploring our growth and levels documents, I came across our internal rubrics that outline the expectations at each level.

Situation: After identifying a gap between my current level and the staff level, I expressed my interest to my manager. As a result, I am now leading a team of five individuals in the endeavor of implementing automation tooling from scratch. This effort encompasses setting up everything related to automation.

Additional Information:

While my background is primarily in development, I possess knowledge and experience in quality as well. Given the broad impact automation can have across the company, I am eager to leverage my expertise and make a significant contribution.

However, I am uncertain if my focus on quality within a developer role might put me at a disadvantage when aiming for a staff position as a developer.

I am seeking guidance on how to navigate the path towards a staff role, either by leading projects to completion (quality) within my team (& across) or by continuing to work on internal tooling rather than customer-facing products.

Or should I pivot to product development tasks - How do I navigate this conversation with my manager about this dilemma?

Lastly, how can I show metrics and impact?

I've been at mid-level for a while, so I want to level up to senior quickly. However, I'm not really sure what I need to do to make this jump - The feedback across my manager and engineering mentors has been good.

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.

I have been at my current organisation for a year and i just received a good performance rating and a raise. I have been doing pretty well overall. However, over the last two months i have felt that this role doesn't fulfill my intellectual needs and I am not challenged enough. I would like to widen the tech stack that I work on and have more flexibility in impacting the product (it's a big tech company and has a lot of hierarchy). To continue to be good at my work, I need to spend a good amount of time (~50% of the time) doing non-challenging/repeated/admin work. I have started taking courses and my attention has derailed from office work quite a bit.

I realise that if i want to get promoted here, I need to continue to do what I did to get the good rating and do it even better perhaps. But at the same time, I yearn to work on a broader tech stack and take on more challenging work which may or may not come my way at my present org. The reasons to not switch would be : it's just been a year here, I have vested RSUs (spread out over 4 years) and a promotion would be good for my career (and good for my self confidence), also the work life balance is decent. But I have the urge to switch my attention to side projects and eventually to a role and company where I'm challenged more and hopefully make a lot more impact (startups).

Do you have any advice for me?

Hi, I've brought up promotion in a 1:1 with my manager, who did not give any specific timelines, saying "I want to set you up for long-term career success."

I have onboarded quickly, as a former intern. My document tracking accomplishments (thanks Alex for the recommendation) has grown substantially in the 2 months since starting at the company. I have been delivering on writing code, experimentation, and design docs, and I recently helped unblock a mid+ level engineer.

However, in our 1:1's, my manager seems unimpressed. On my end, my presentation of accomplishments could be better. At the same time, most people on my team, including my manager, seem to have a lot on their plates.

Work is the top priority for me for the foreseeable future, and I want to make sure I'm not getting passed on for promotion in favor of a junior who has less accomplishments but whose manager is more easily impressed (like my previous internship team's EM).

So I have two questions:

1. How should I approach the promotion conversation? Give it some time? Bring it up consistently in 1:1's?
2. What should I do to impress my manager?

I worked on backend for 10+ years and was a Tech Lead before switching to iOS for the last 10+ years. I was offered an E6 position at a Big Tech company, but I asked to be down-leveled to E5 due to imposter syndrome since I mostly worked at smaller startups and didn't know what to expect. When Leadership later found out that I have backend experience, they started pushing me to do backend. Is it easier to get to E6 doing only iOS or doing both iOS and backend? I'm much faster coding iOS than backend since I know the Xcode shortcuts, a lot has changed in backend over the past decade (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes, etc.), etc.

I am a 15 year experienced software professional holding H1B. In my last 3 companies, I was a Senior Software Engineer. In my penultimate company, I was due for Staff promotion. Fast Forwarding, I was impacted by layoffs in Jan this year. I had 3 months to find a job in this market. I was applying and passing on my resume through all my network. Most of my applications got rejected quoting they picked another candidate. Some of my applications materialized into interviews , but I ended up not clearing (was in bad form and stress and also didn't get ample time to prepare thoroughly).

Finally, I got my application picked at a company through a referral, but they only considered me for SWE2. I explained them my experience and requested to consider me for SSE level, they said the panel will be open to it. But in the end, they ended up offering me SWE2. I took the offer as I had no choice. I was running out of time and did'nt want to risk rejecting this offer and waiting for a better offer. I took up the offer and joined, but I don't feel happy. I wish I had more time to really choose what I wanted.

I would like your thoughts on how "wise" is it to be SWE2 with 15 years experience. Would my age become a factor for further career progressions as they would prefer younger people? I am confused if I should stick to this, be patient, work smart and work my way up inside, or would it make more sense to keep interviewing and find something that I feel happy about. Look forward to helpful replies or referrals for SSE :)

I'm considering a team switch, but I'm wary of the effect that it will have on my E3 -> E4 promotion timeline, which I know we have to do within 2 years. I've been at Meta for around a half - Does the timing for a switch work out here and what other factors should I consider?

I’ve been e3 for about two years. my manager put me for promo last two halves but it didn’t go through .(due to a bunch of reasons which are ambiguous , the feedback I got both times was - you’re doing 4 work but we have a quota) I believe there was some politics involved but that’s water under the bridge.

I’m going to reach e4 end of this half. I’ve lost trust in my management chain. I do think my team may have good opportunity and everything else is good but I don’t think my manager is invested in growing me.

I’m very ambitious and would like to get to e5 asap. What would be good ways to set myself up for success?

I am a senior software engineer working primarily in Python. I consider myself a pretty good coder, being able to solve problems and deliver software on time at the necessary SLA. I understand and have worked with the major Python web frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, and Django.

But I see a lot of things lacking in myself. I am not able to handle algorithms very well, nor am I able to efficiently use design patterns.

I see that all of these skills are part of FAANG interviews and much sought after.

I also understand that there is Leetcode, HackerRank, CodeSignal and that help better ability.

What is the best way one can upskill self given the many options?

I'm trying to get promoted to E5, and my progress so far has been decent. I'm doing well on all 4 axes, but I currently have a gap on the people axis (it's not Exceeds Expectations yet). I know that people/direction are very important for E5s, so I really want to get better here. I do things like give tech talks and mentor some rotational engineers, but it doesn't seem to be enough for an E5-level people contribution. What can I do to shore up this aspect of my performance?

Some engineers like to code, some like to manage projects, some like to stay close to the users. Software Engineers come in all shapes and sizes.

What are the major archetypes of Software Engineers and how can one identify one's own archetype to double down and improve.

Hi everyone,

I just recently accepted an offer at Google as an L3. The thing is I have 4.5 years of experience full time and have done a number of internships (that I'm not counting in the 4.5). I didn't do super great in the coding rounds and couldn't get cleared for L4 but managed to get approved at L3. The coding rounds (specifically, algorithm optimization) was the specific reason they gave for the down level.

I firmly do believe I'm of L3 level, my manager did as well. I'm not great at leetcode so that part was off but my performance was very good at my previous company and I hope to get promoted to L4 as quickly as possible.

Anyone have advice specific to someone that was down leveled? I see a lot of discussion on a promotion from L3 to L4 in general which I've been reading a lot on. But I was curious about the down leveled case specifically

Also another thing to note - I'm about halfway through the L3 to L4 course and I'd say my skills line up virtually entirely with what Alex is describing as L4 (I used to do a lot of the L3 stuff but have improved). Is this just a matter of coming in and making sure I perform as highly as I can to speed up the process?

I was told that exceeding expectations doesn't necessarily mean that you're operating at the next level, so I would like to get more clarity here. What does it mean to exceed expectations in a way that's building up towards promotions vs. not?

Hello lovely Community! 👋

I am currently working as Senior Software Engineer 1 and I am close to get promoted in the next performance review cycle.

My manager asked me to create a development plan and individual goals to track the progress efficiently.

Wanted to understand how the development plan and individual goals should look like for Senior Engineer?

Manager and I have a disagreement on creating a promo doc as per the approach suggested by Rahul and Alex .

So to avoid losing the time I went ahead with working on a XFN project, say Project XFNA , as it has high visibility and chance of impact. Due to the complexity I had to spend lot more time on it than I initially estimated.

It meant putting 1 week time learning/testing a frontend framework , Angular and I am a backend developer and never done Frontend coding earlier.

What happened was.. my main project's progress ( say Projects B , which doesn't have impact opportunities in the short term) got delayed by a week , due to my focused attention on Project XFNA. I am Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon.

I will need to defend my time on this project XFNA as I focused on it purely for delivering quick impacts. So can I say to my Mgr that I "I took this initiative to work on Project XFNA for showing impact in the short term". If not, how should I rephrase it?

For me i am looking for promotions. I architected, led a staff level project successfully with 5 engineers working with me over a period of 5 months.

Nor one person had a bad thing to say about me or the project and everyone agrees it was a major step for our team.

To be fair, I had a troubled relationship with a principal engineer who namecalled me in a public meeting with my engineering manager in that meeting and I decided to stop talking to him (i would avoid going to meetings with him instead of confronting him)

The principal engineer gave my managers feedback that I am trying to hoard information.

Now my manager is giving me the feedback that I don't go along well with more senior engineers (which is not true, it is just 1 person). I was denied promotion even though more senior engineers than me who I led are getting promoted.

There is also some resume driven development going on at the management level and pe level which is what I was asking questions about.

This was the reason for strong resistance against me and product.

From my end I have tried to normalize my relationships. But it seems my hard work may be better rewarded elsewhere.

I don't want to say all this but am curious how would one let their managers know that they are looking outside within the company. The reason for letting them know is they will get an email when I apply internally.

How does one approach switching teams internally without bad-mouthing the old team?

And can we switch and up-level internally? I have usually only seen lateral moves.

I am very much aligned and aware with needing to show impact or been seen as an SME to have visibility to move up to a staff level.

My question is one of logistics. How is this possible when you have more work to do than fits in 40 hours, let alone finding extra time to do these other things? For example if you have at least 30 hours of coding, 5 hours of code reviews or scoping documentation, 5 hours of meetings, an additional 5 hours of random things (CI broken, helping colleagues, ad hoc issues etc), where do you even begin to find time for these extra things? Especially when all of the above is barely considered meeting expectations?

I will also clarify that I don't want “get better at coding” as a valid answer. No matter how good you are, you still need to understand the many systems involved which can take a while and if you constantly have to tackle new areas, there's always discovery.

My question is more around how do you ask or “show” you should have time to work on other things. Whenever I would approach my manager with well thought out proposals, buy in, and even timelines the answer was always later.

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.

I don't hate my job but not interested in overly performing as I am not happy with my compensation.

1. No motivation to prepare for interviews in the current market

2. I just want to do whatever is assigned to me. I have no leadership skills, no confidence. No motivation to put lot of efforts and make an impact due to low compensation to fix my leadership and communication issues. It typically takes 2.5-3 years to get promoted to next level as an average engineer like me. I have been stuck due to immigration issues. Manager has too many reportees. Hiring freeze everywhere.

Do you have any recommendation on what to do in this case?

When I joined the startup, I was the most experienced engineer and I had two junior engineers working with me. At that point, I had the choice to make architecture decisions and the CTO would work with me to design new systems. The systems I created have worked well, it has been 1 year now and there are no issues with them.

The company has grown and we have hired a lot of seniors now. I have not been included in any new discussions like hiring, the product roadmap. Even on a project where I had taken the lead on it from a very long time (I was not assigned to it, I just assumed the ownership) now the CTO wants the opinion of another senior engineer.

I'm good at infra work and have setup infra when the senior engineers are not able to do it. I'm not sure about my level either as during the 1:1s I was level as an upper mid level while my colleagues believe I'm senior. It shouldn't really matter as I want to just write code and help others, but with a proper title, I think people might take me more seriously.

When speaking to the CTO about my performance, they believe that I'm doing good and probably I'm being too hard on myself. I do know I have dropped the ball at times as I have too much on my plate at times.

I'm just scared that I'm becoming becoming less relevant in the company & really want to increase my influence.

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting on this forum, so I apologize in advance for breaking any common etiquettes. I have some clarifications to make regarding my career path. I always loved writing, and I have experience in writing for the newspaper, online blogs, user manuals, etc. over the years. I also have experience in the tech industry in full-stack development, game development and DevOps related tasks. Since I have passion for both domains, I am sort of in a crossroads in deciding whether I want to pursue a software engineering role or a writing role. I feel like being a technical writer brings together the best of both worlds, although I could be wrong.

1. Is it a realistic career path with a good career progression?
2. How does it compare to being a software engineer in terms of pay and work-life balance?
3. Is it easy to switch back to a software engineering role if I feel like tech writing is not for me?

Thank you!