Note: these are my thoughts, and not the thoughts of my employer.
I wasn't interested in promotions for most of my career. I had a simple reason: I didn't want the jobs that promotions would give me. They would have made me unhappy. But then I joined Etsy four years ago. This put me in unfamiliar territory: I wanted to grow my engineering career for the first time. Getting the next promotion would make me a staff software engineer.
I achieved this a year and a half ago. This is the advice that I'd give myself when I started at Etsy four years ago. I tried to make it broadly applicable. I hope that others find it useful. It is targeted towards senior engineers who are looking to reach staff within a few years.
Let's chat definitions real quick. "Staff software engineer" varies wildly between companies. Sometimes it's called a "principal engineer," and other times a "staff" and "principal" are two different levels on the same ladder. But I'm describing the first level that is partially scoped outside of a team. A staff engineer is often an individual contributor on a team. They are also recognized for having broad impact outside of their team. Maybe they're clutch on business-critical projects. Maybe they wrote and maintain the framework that everyone uses. Maybe they're good at coordinating the technical work of huge projects. Maybe they do all of that. They're senior employees who have started to level up other parts of the company.
Understanding the process
First, understand the mechanics of how promotions work. Read any documentation on the evaluation and promotion process.
Let's imagine a process at a mid-size company.
Employee evaluation
- Every level has written performance expectations.
- Employees write a self-evaluation every 6 or 12 months. They compare themselves to their level's written performance expectations.
- Managers assess their employees. This produces a rating against the performance expectations. This may contradict the employee's assessment.
- There is a company-wide adjustment process. This attempts to correct for the fact that different managers might rate the same employee differently.
Employee promotion
- A promotion candidate should have two consecutive evaluations showing that they are meeting the next level's criteria. There may be some flexibility here.
- The employee or the manager will document the employee's promotion justification. This is often called a "promotion packet."
- The promotion packet follows a template. The company is "trying out a new template that is much shorter than it used to be." It will still take forever to fill out.
- The manager collects peer reviews from higher-level employees that are familiar with the candidate's work.
- One or more high-level employees read the reviews and packet and make a decision on the promotion.
To some approximation, this is what formalized promotion processes look like at mid-size companies. Most companies aren't trying to innovate here. I'd be suspicious if they did.
Understand the real promotion process
I had a misconception when I was a new grad. I figured that companies followed their written rules. It turned out that this isn't true. Companies develop their own conventions and interpretations that might surprise the casual reader. There are also unwritten rules that you'll learn over time.
What do I mean? Let's take hockey as an example. The NHL has an official rulebook. You could read it today. The rulebook explains how hockey is supposed to work. Rink size, skates, sticks, face-offs, 20 minute periods, offsides, power plays, overtime, waivers, etc.
You read the rulebook. Armed with your new knowledge, you watch some games. The rulebook prepared you fairly well. But some things confuse you.
Every game has blatant infractions that the refs ignore. A few hooks aren't penalized. Power forwards ram into goalies and goalies cross-check them back. Hits behind the play. The referees see it all. Yet they don't call penalties. Even more confusingly, other rules are universally obeyed. The players avoid offsides penalties and the linesmen call them. There was a high-stick, and the offending player looked at the ceiling in frustration and skated to the penalty box without a struggle.
Then you'll notice other oddities. Sometimes, the refs will make a blatant mistake. A star forward falls over when skating past an opposing player. The refs raise their hand: tripping. The star player's team has a one-man advantage for 2 minutes. But then the video replay shows that the star player just fell over. Even pros lose their edge sometimes. It shouldn't have been a penalty. The man advantage is unfair. But then the oddest thing happens. Later, the refs will make a second mistake in the opposite direction. Maybe it wasn't a "mistake," but they called a penalty they normally ignore.
What's going on?
Hockey would suck if referees called every possible penalty. The game would take forever. Nobody would watch it. So the refs "put the whistles away" when games are under control: they avoid stopping play by ignoring minor infractions. Additionally, the officials have their own unspoken rules. Maybe they award make-up calls to correct accidental imbalances. They could make the same game different for every player. In fact, one of the most punitive tools available to a referee is holding just a single player to the letter of every rule. This isn't unique to hockey.
I could go on and on. But let's face it: the NHL rulebook doesn't define all of the rules that govern a hockey game. It's the NHL's best effort to write down what hockey should be. In practice, the referees decide what hockey will be on any given day. But what if the rulebook grants the referees discretion? It doesn't change the argument. Different refs will call the same game differently. The enforced rules still vary from the written rules in ways that can't be learned from the rulebook.
The actual staff engineering promotion process
What lesson can we draw from hockey? The staff engineering promotion process will differ from the written process in ways that are hard to predict. You should be aware of the differences.
These differences can be discovered. Ask existing staff engineers what surprised them about their promotion. Ask your manager. Ask your manager's manager. Disgruntled Glassdoor reviews or blog posts might have some perspectives that correct for survivorship bias.
In theory, promotions are awarded based on merit. In practice, nobody has equal context across all departments. The decision will be imprecise. Discussions and decisions rely on the written reviews and personal opinions of the participants. People always describe this part like it's shrouded in mystery. But in practice it's just "people trying to decide something," and will have all of the properties of this type of system.
Sometimes there are secret rules or systems. You should try to discover them. Sometimes the secret rules are mundane, like "HighRankingEmployee thinks that employees should be at their level for three years between each promotion because otherwise how could you have enough of a track record?" Sometimes these rules are secret because the company would get sued if they were written down. If you've been in the industry long enough, you've heard stories about how someone (usually from an underrepresented group) learned that their salary was dramatically less than their peers. Here's an example if you need one. The employee handbook doesn't say "Take advantage of structural discrimination and information asymmetry to save a few bucks." But that's what the company does. I don't have a good guide for finding this out. It's not like you can just ask at the next all-hands. But making and maintaining lots of work friendships opens you up to hearing this kind of gossip.
So, yeah! Understand the written promotion process. And talk to people to understand the human element of the promotion process.
Being honest with yourself
I joined Etsy as a senior engineer. During an early conversation with my director, Tim, I asked what the staff engineering promotion process is like. Tim turned it around on me. "Why do you want to be a staff engineer?"
I was caught off-guard. I should have admitted the truth: I hadn't asked about this when I was interviewing and I was curious. Instead I stammered out a half-baked answer. Tim listened and said, "It sounds like you haven't quite figured out why you want to be a staff engineer. It's not the right path for everyone. Please understand the answer to this before you spend a lot of people's time trying to get there."
Fair.
It took a while to find an answer. I got there eventually. Someone asked me a year later and I answered "I was never super interested in my career before I joined Etsy. And I probably could have joined some other company like Facebook and given 5 years of my life to the Like button. But I joined Etsy because I like the idea of helping small sellers sell their stuff on a global stage and giving them a platform to help pay the bills or be their own boss. Performing at my job means that I'm enacting more of a change that I want to see in the world. Becoming a staff engineer means that I'm starting to make the entire organization more effective at enacting the positive changes that I want to see in the world. It's important to me to keep leveling this up."
Don't memorize the paragraph that I have above. That was my reason. It's important to find your own reason.
Why? It helps you avoid wasting years on a goal that will make you unhappy. Maybe you'd rather work towards becoming a director because you'd be energized by running a department. Maybe you look at the people above your level and think, "I'd be really unhappy if I had any of their jobs." Maybe you live and breathe tech and less hands-on coding would make you dissatisfied. Maybe your passion lives outside of work and you need something that pays the bills. There are so many valid career paths. It'd be a shame to spend years reaching for the wrong one.
Getting yourself in position
So you want to be a staff engineer. What next?
First, you need to execute at the level of a staff engineer.
Have a frank conversation with your manager about your performance and career trajectory. I've found it useful to just say, "My rough plan is to 'exceed expectations' in $cycle and to get promoted in $next_cycle. Does that seem realistic?"
Expect the answer to be "no." That's okay! Setting a target and expressing interest helps both of you. Your manager can guide you towards projects that will help you grow. They can find you opportunities. They can give you realistic expectations. They can tell you that you need to work longer before you even ask about it. But they may not do any of these things if you don't express interest.
The goal of promotion is twofold: meet the performance objectives of the next level, and to demonstrate that you are performing at the level. These are subtly different. You should always find ways to leave breadcrumbs of your accomplishments. This provides evidence that you're performing. This usually involves leaving a summary. Consider the case where you consulted on another team's project across a few meetings. You could email out a meeting summary of each meeting and everyone's contributions. This will provide a record of your accomplishments that might have otherwise been lost.
I want to be clear: the first priority is to be valuable. The second priority is to prove that you added value. Are you hyping up work to make it sound like you're meeting a competency? Then you're not meeting that competency and you're not performing at the staff level yet. Performing at the level is foundational.
Schedule meetings with people who have worked with you for at least 6 months. Bonus if they're more senior than you. Bonus if they've worked at the company for a long time. Bonus if they're directly involved in the promotion process. Ask them questions like "What's the difference between me and a staff engineer?" You're hunting for objections that people might have to your promotion. You'll notice themes after asking a few people. These are the possible objections that people may raise when you apply for promotion. Work hard to grow past these objections. Be mindful to produce evidence that the objections have been overcome.
Are you known for quickly implementing things? Consider spending an hour a day working on high-impact side projects. These projects should be low-effort and high-reward. These types of projects are easier to find at mid-sized companies. Mid-size companies are large enough to create small problems, but small enough to have trouble allocating resources to fix them. Need an example? Write a testing utility to reduce boilerplate for a common testing situation. People should want the result. Explain it to a few people if you're not sure. If nobody says some variant of "I wish that someone did that," consider picking another project. Tell people after you implement it. Send an email or Slack message or whatever telling people about it. Rinse and repeat. You'll get better at identifying these projects over time.
You might want to change teams to pursue a good opportunity for promotion. There are lots of valid reasons to look for a team change. Maybe the new role will clearly help you grow compared to your current job. Maybe you've always wanted to work under the new manager. There's nothing wrong with changing teams. It's just business. But don't change teams solely for a promotion. That's a recipe for unhappiness. A good fit is way more important. You may need to overperform your current role for years before you are promoted. Find a team where you may be happy for years.
Putting yourself in position is not a solitary process. You will need the feedback, help, and support of everyone around you. You need your manager's support to produce a good plan and be on the right projects. You need your colleagues' support to help you identify your blind spots to get yourself promoted. And you need your teammates' support to work on projects with you (and potentially under you, if your promotion plan involves being a tech lead). Don't forget this.
Providing the evidence
You'll be ready when your manager is willing to defend your promotion. At a mid-size company, it'd be difficult to be promoted without your manager's support. This may not be true in FAANG-sized companies that have realized that processes need exceptions. But a smaller company may not yet have any workarounds.
First, gather all of the evidence that supports your promotion. You can collect this from a variety of places:
- What have you committed?
- What pull requests have you commented on?
- What designs have you written?
- What designs have you commented on?
- What meetings were you in?
- What documentation have you written?
- Who have you been mentoring?
- What emails have you sent?
- Who can vouch for your work? Can they write you a recommendation level?
Understand how the promotion packet is crafted. The manager will do part of it. This could range from "the manager writes a statement in support of the employee" to "the manager summarizes the entire argument for promotion."
Manager involvement has benefits. Managers are supposed to understand the performance management system. They are well-positioned to craft persuasive arguments within this system. Heavy manager participation also has drawbacks: managers are most overwhelmed during performance management and promotion season. The most overwhelmed may be forced to make hard choices about how to spend their time.
Help your manager before the process starts. Write a document summarizing how you met every competency. Provide links. "I worked on ProjectX and produced these designs: [link, link], and had the following technical accomplishments: [link, link]. I had mentorship relationships with $engineer_x and $engineer_y, and wrote $internal_documentation offering people suggestions on how to effectively mentor engineers." Err towards oversharing. Make it easy to copy and paste. This means that the writing should be polished.
Don't overstate your accomplishments. If you worked on a design with someone, say that you "co-designed" it. Don't make it sound like you implemented entire projects if you were one part of a team. If you're ready for promotion, you should be able to directly state why your accomplishments met the guidelines.
Managers are familiar with your work. But they're not living your life. They may not remember all of your accomplishments, especially ones that happened outside of the team. Be sure to produce the summary. Don't hold back. They can cherry pick what you gave them.
What if your promotion may be borderline? This can happen naturally: the performance process happens at a fixed cadence. Sometimes it doesn't happen at a perfectly convenient time. Focus on the story of why your accomplishments meet the promotion guidelines. Remember all of those electronic records that you've been producing about your accomplishments? Extract and summarize the themes from them. Use the records as proof. Pull things into linkable formats and provide the links. People like stories and they like having reasons for their decisions.
What if you get rejected? Rejections are okay, even if they feel bad. They're not permanent. They simply mean that you either haven't persuaded everyone that you're meeting the guidelines, or there are guidelines that you need to meet. Have the specific objections explained to you. Keep asking until you are given specifics. Vague reasons are difficult to address. Don't accept the "keep doing what you're doing" explanation. 6 months later, you probably kept doing what you were doing, but you still won't get promoted. "Not enough of a track record" isn't a specific reason. "If you launched your current project, we'd have the evidence we need" is a specific reason. "You met the technical criteria, but your teammates report that you give harsh feedback so we're worried about putting you in a broader role" is a specific reason.
Work with your manager to develop a plan for showing evidence that you've overcome those objections. The evidence is important. It will provide the story about why you're ready for promotion the next time. "We thought that they hadn't provided enough mentorship. But in addition to the 1:1s they had been holding with their teammates, they took a few professional coaching sessions on mentorship, they onboarded 2 new engineers, and polished and promoted the team's onboarding documentation for everyone across the company to use"
In summary
Understand the process: Talk to as many people as possible about your specific company's promotion process. Learn how it's supposed to happen. Learn how it actually happens. Understand the human elements that factor into the promotion decision.
Put yourself in position: Learn how to perform at the necessary level. Have frank performance conversations about how you are performing, and how people are perceiving your performance. Do everything that you can to address any objections that people bring up. Leave evidence about your accomplishments.
Provide the evidence: Help your manager when you're going up for promotion. Provide a summary of how your work meets the promotion threshold. If you get rejected, ask until you receive specifics. Then, work with your manager to craft a plan to overcome these objections.
