Curious about the feedback side of it. When someone you barely worked with asks you for promo feedback, does that read as genuine or as working the system? Wondering where you draw that line.
Why hard work doesn't equal a promotion
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Most career advice tells you to just upgrade your skills or grow your impact. But reflecting on my own path and my experience evaluating others, here are two major pieces of reality people rarely talk about.
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Curious about the feedback side of it. When someone you barely worked with asks you for promo feedback, does that read as genuine or as working the system? Wondering where you draw that line.
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I provided peer feedback for an engineer’s promotion again today and have some thoughts to share. I have worked for two different types of companies but I’ve never actually used any of the standard “promotion tips”.
For a long time, my career just moved forward naturally. But looking back, I realize that had less to do with me. Over the years, I worked for two completely different companies: 1, result-driven: this is straightforward. If you hit the goals and deliver your projects, you get promoted. 2, metric-driven: this is the corporate world of complex rubrics, calibration committees, and multi-layered processes.
in the second kind of company, hard work alone is never enough. My recent promotion only happened because my manager looked at the bigger picture, guided each step for me, and gathered all the internal data points to build a case for me. Honestly, without a manager willing to do that kind of heavy lifting behind the scenes, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
Most career advice tells you to just upgrade your skills or grow your impact. But reflecting on my own path and my experience evaluating others, here are the two major pieces of reality people rarely talk about.
1, when a company looks beyond raw output, your manager becomes the single most important factor in your growth. Doing good work is just the baseline; you need a manager who actually knows how to navigate the internal system and fight for you behind the scenes. A capable manager will fast-track you while an incapable or unsupportive one will leave you stuck forever, no matter how hard you work.
2, everyone is busy and nobody is tracking your day-to-day performance. If you want support from senior team members for your promotion, you need to get on the radar early. Go to the office hours, ask feedback on your designs, and ask challenging questions. I provided promotion feedbacks several times. I am always much more willing to write positive feedback and I actually have the specific data points to back it up for people who actively reach out and ask me questions.
Thoughts
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How much of that case did your manager gather himself, and how much of it was already written down somewhere by you for him to find?
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Point 2 is just: the review is a memory test and you are responsible for supplying the memory.
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Point 2 is real and it is also where the cost lands unevenly. The person who books time with three staff engineers to ask challenging questions gets read as ambitious in some rooms and as pushy in others, and that read is not distributed randomly. I have watched two people run the same play in the same quarter and get very different words written about them.
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The two company types look to me like one company at two sizes. Result driven works until there are more claims on the budget than there is budget, and then you get rubrics and a calibration room. Manager dependency is not a property of the second kind, it shows up the moment nobody can watch everyone directly.
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Você tem toda a razão! O esforço é importante, mas não é o único caminho — muitas vezes falta oportunidade, reconhecimento ou até saber mostrar o que fazemos. Não se culpe quando o resultado não vem como esperado: a verdade não é só trabalhar muito, mas sim trabalhar com sabedoria!
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After you worked with a good manager and switched to a bad manager, it feels even worse because of the comparing. In this case, do you think it is better to change team/company or just lower your expectation?
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Agree as a manager, to a certain point... There's two side to it, I see it a artisan making jewelry. For sure it depends a lot on the artisan, but you can't make great jewelry out of plastic. You need gold to work on.
The points above stand, you definitely need a manager to take care of all those things, but then you need to execute and excel on your own as well to give material to your manager to work with. So, continue being gold and rely on great jewelry makers to take care of the rest :)
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Curious about the feedback side of it. When someone you barely worked with asks you for promo feedback, does that read as genuine or as working the system? Wondering where you draw that line.
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Point 1 is true and also a reason to leave. If your growth depends on one person being willing to do the paperwork, that is a single point of failure. Switching teams beat out-working a bad manager, twice.
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The calibration part is the bit most people never see. By the time the committee meets, the decision is mostly already made in hallway conversations and in whatever your manager wrote down three months ago. Nobody in that room is going to reconstruct your year from scratch. Most of what your manager does for you happens before that meeting ever starts.
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