Career Growth Accelerator - Promotion Roadblocks and Knocking it Out of the Park During Performance Review Season

[Music] Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer T. We're coming to the end of January. It's probably review season for a lot of you and that's what we're going to talk about today. You might be excited. You might be disappointed. But many of you may end up confused. Why did you not get the promotion that you've been promised? Or why did you not get the promotion that you expected to get for a long time? There are probably a lot of you who even get good ratings, depending on what your rating system is in the company that you're in. You know, you're getting above expectations or if you have a one out of five system, you're getting fours, maybe even a five is thrown in there. And you can't imagine why it's possible that you're getting high rating, but you're not getting a promotion. And in today's episode, I want to talk about the two main reasons that this is probably happening. Before we get into those two main reasons, I do want to take a moment to give you a little bit of extra advice about review season. This is the next installment of our career accelerator series, a career growth accelerator series. The goal of this series of episodes is not to create some perfect roadmap for how to improve your career, but instead to really focus on the issues that senior engineers that managers tend to face in their career growth pathways. You know, when you're a younger engineer, a lot of your growth is largely put in front of you. Your manager's going to tell you what to do is as long as you do those things to a high degree of quality and you stick with your convictions and you continue expanding your skill set, those are kind of automatic moves forward and moves upward. Usually you're going to see some kind of promotion pathway just by completing the work that's handed to you to complete. But as you continue growing in your career, that becomes less and less likely. Less and less likely that all you have to do is whatever you're told to do. Right. And so growth in your career then becomes bottlenecked by other things, other things that may not necessarily be intuitive to you. And that's what this series of episodes has been about. These often are mindset adjustments that you can make. Sometimes they are vantage point adjustments. There are ways of looking at the situation from a different angle. Sometimes it is a skill thing, but usually at this stage in your career, the hard skills that you have are not really the unlocking. The thing is going to unlock the next big phase in your career. Most of the time that's true, every once in a while you might have a skill alignment issue that another candidate, for example, if you're trying to get a promotion by way of leaving your job, which we've talked about on the show before. And if you're trying to move into another role that's a step up by going from one company to another, and that's your promotion pathway, you may get edged out from a role because of a hard skill that you haven't demonstrated that you have. That does happen, but most of the time, most of the time, your growth into senior level, higher senior level, principal, staff, from maybe even into a manager role if you're looking to switch tracks or into a senior manager role, director level. All of these things are less likely to be about hard skills and just stacking up your skill levels. And more likely to be about something else. What is that something else? Is what we're really talking about. I want to take a step back and give you a couple of kind of practical tips before we dive into those kind of two big roadblocks, we'll say, that are keeping you from getting the promotion despite having good performance. Before we get to that, let's talk about review season. Your review is something that you and your manager really should be doing together, and it's not something that you should be thinking about for the first time, two weeks before the review starts. The most common mistake I see with this is that people underestimate the leverage, the leverage that this specific set of events has over their career. Companies do this differently. Most of the time, companies follow some kind of pattern where they have a review, a performance review, annual performance review. You may even do it as often as quarterly, but most companies don't have the resources to do it that often. The most common is going to be probably the annual performance review. This is the opportunity for you to have your performance as an individual rated. You do this essentially as a cohort. Sometimes companies will do this per department at different times, but usually this happens company-wide. Your performance is being rated, but so is everyone else's. What this means is this isn't a vacuum problem. You're not being evaluated in isolation from everyone else, even if the company tries to do that. Understand this very carefully. Your evaluation, because it is happening in proximity to others' evaluations, you will be evaluated against your peers. It will be evaluated against people who are not even necessarily your peers levels above or levels below you. You're going to be compared to them, even if the company says that they are comparing you in isolation. Why is this? Because it's impossible for the people who are doing that comparison to actually isolate. They're going to have the context in mind of conversations they just had about another person. The evaluation in almost every reasonable company is not entirely left up to your manager. Your manager has a major role in this, but it's not entirely left up to them. They are bringing your profile, some kind of evidence of your performance. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but evidence of your performance, they're bringing that to the table, and they're talking with their peers about that evidence. We said in a previous episode in the Career Growth Accelerator series to know who your voters are. This group of people, your boss's peers turn out to be your voters. This is, again, not an intuitive thing, but your boss's peers, the people that they have to go and convince of your value, they are your voters. They are the ones who are going to back what your manager says. By the way, your manager is also, of course, perhaps your most important voter. Convincing your manager, you are doing great work, is a huge step to take. It's very hard with a good manager, especially, to convince them of that when it's not true. Everything does come back to actually doing good work, but then you have to actually understand who your audience says, and in this case, your voters, in this case, is your manager and your manager's peers. Your peer feedback always into this. We won't rehash everything we talked about in that episode. Go back and listen to it if you haven't yet. That is the general process. You're going to develop some kind of evidence. Your manager is going to collect this evidence for you and all of your peers, the people that report to your manager. Your manager's already doing some kind of cross-evaluation between you and other people. They're going to bring that to their peers. This may be called a calibration session. Most of the places I've worked at as a manager call it a calibration session, where you try to get some idea of how should somebody at this level be performing. Some companies do this with relation to their pay grade. Some companies don't. Some companies just use the level and they try to evaluate against the level and they hold pay as a totally separate variable. It all depends on the company. You're not going to be able to necessarily get in and change those sliders yourself. For the most part, your main job here, your main job is to provide clear evidence about things that those voters care about. Things that those voters care about. Most of the time, the easy answer here, the home run hit, the one that doesn't fail is your ability to show your impact on the company's goals. That's simple. What is your ability to show the impact that you have on what the company cares about? Usually, this is in the form of deliverables, some kind of goals, some kind of project, something that wouldn't have shipped, wouldn't have happened, where it's not for your intervention, your push, your energy, your insight, whatever those things are. If you can show that you had a direct impact on something that the company strategically cares about, a close second here is some kind of impact on the way that your team operates, the way that the broader engineering org operates. Those are going to be the things that improve your performance level. They improve people's perception of how well you're doing at your level. I do want to make special mention of this concept of competency. Most companies have some kind of way of defining what this is. If yours doesn't, then go back and use your job description. Try to reference as much as you can your documented responsibilities. If you have a competency matrix or some list of competency things that are associated with your level, try to reference those. We'll talk about this after the break here in just a moment. You should also be looking at the competency's job description of a level above your current level. These are really important things to do that are, again, they're just not intuitive. Nobody ever really trains you on how to do this documentation because so many times managers also are doing the bare minimum on this. Not because they're trying to hose you, not because they don't care about your career, but because they also weren't trained in this. So many of us are just trying to figure this out. If you know about this going in, if you're in the midst of review season and you haven't done this, if you haven't gone to collect evidence and match it up to your competencies, to those job description responsibilities that are directly aligned with your role, this is a huge help in kind of validating that you're meeting the expectations of your role and exceeding them where possible. Okay, so what are these two blocking things then? The two kind of main road blocks to you actually getting the promotion. You've already met the responsibilities of the role. You're exceeding expectations in some regard or maybe in the past couple of rounds, you've got an above average rating. Why aren't you getting the promotion? We're going to talk about the two reasons why right after we talk about today's sponsor. Very excited to have unblocked back as today's sponsor. There's a good chance that you've already tried to review code using some kind of AI code review tool. And you're probably at this point, if you're like me, you're ignoring a lot of their comments. A lot of their automated pull requests are not really something that you would merge into your code base. Why is that? It's not because AI can't review code like most things. It just takes a little bit more. In this case, it's probably missing context. Most AI reviewers focus on surface level issues that would be easy to find for just about any engineer. You're going to see the problem as an obvious refactor. Maybe it's clearly duplicating logic. But the stuff that is going to miss is the deeper stuff. Things you actually care about like violating architectural decisions and architectural patterns or duplicating logic that is not obvious in another part of the code base. For example, maybe able to pick up on the stuff that's really close by, but not more distant. And it would be able to know that if it had the right context. And this is the problem that Unblocked is building a solution to right now. It's getting better and better. Unblocks AI code review is grounded in decision-grade context. Prior PRs, design discussions, documentation, system level constraints, the same context that a senior engineer and maybe you would use when you're relying on in order to rely on for reviewing code yourself. So teams are using Unblocked right now. They're reporting fewer comments, higher signal from the AI code reviews, automated reviews they actually can trust. Enough that many have turned off other AI review tools entirely. Even if you've already written off AI code review, Unblocked is worth a look. And you don't have to spend money to find out. You can get a free three week trial at getunblocked.com/developer team. You can upgrade your AI code review processes for free for free. You can try for free getunblock.com/developer team. That's a free three week trial. I almost missed it there. It's kind of hard to say free three week trial. Getunblock.com/developer team. Thank you again to Unblocked for sponsoring today's episode of developer team. So we're talking about reviews and review season. And you found yourself going through these reviews every six months or every year. And the same thing tends to happen. You run into the same row blocks. Your manager comes to you and says, hey, you know, you did great this year. Thank you for collecting all this information. You exceeded expectations. And then there's kind of this pause. Right. You're waiting for them to say, well, and we've decided to promote you. Right. That's it's really the big unlock that you're waiting on. And for whatever reason, it hasn't happened. And there are some roles where this tends to happen more often than others. Right. This is not common to happen when you go from mid-level engineer to senior engineer. A lot of times that block is it's not where this is going to happen as often. The time that happens is usually one step up from that. When you're going from senior to staff or when you're going from manager to director. When you're going from kind of, you know, an already senior role to a level up from that, it can happen at any level. You could get stuck at a level and feel like you don't know what you have to do to get passed it. And honestly, you know, this is kind of a hard thing for a manager to pin point. And that's why I'm going to give you this advice now. The two things that are most commonly blocking people from getting the promotion they want. The first one is the the the kind of breakup trope. It's not me. It's it's not me. It's you. Wait, it's the other way around. It's not you. It's it's me. It's not you. It's me. This is the situation where the organization for whatever reason doesn't have the role carved out correctly for you. All right. So this can happen, especially in smaller organizations, when the growth position that you're talking about wanting to grow into is not clearly defined or there's not an organizational business need for that role. All right. This sounds like an excuse in a small organization. It can almost guarantee you it's not. The roles that we're talking about here are things like a staff or a principal level engineer. Right. And the reason why this can happen is because sometimes the scope of work that an organization is doing doesn't have the broad context that a staff engineer or a principal level engineer would be required to be able to handle. The the other possibility is that the the scale of the organization there's already somebody or there may be a handful of somebody's that are occupying that role. This is this is true for I see is it's even more true in a management context, right? It's even more true. If you wanted to be promoted from you know manager to senior manager, then depending on how the organization defines these roles, there may be a way to do that if you're still kind of managing, you know, senior I see's and maybe you're managing two teams rather than one team. That can happen in that in that case. But going from a manager to a director director to VP role, the further you go up on a management chain, generally speaking, the fewer opportunities or openings at that level, there are, right? And this makes natural sense because you know, generally speaking, if you go from manager to whatever manager plus one is in your company, usually this is called director. The director has to be able to manage another manager, right? The manager of manager's role. If there's not a manager for you to manage, the company is unlikely to try to create an org structure just for you to get a promotion. Right? The business need is not emerging. So you're going to end up being a very high, high performing manager because the organization can't just splinter off and create a manager for you to manage in order for you to grow in your career. So this is kind of an uncomfortable truth about your career journey, which is, you know, some parts of our careers are about timing and luck. Some parts are about serendipity. Some parts are about being in the right place at the right time, you know, growing with a company at the right time. Such that, hey, you know, you and your manager are recognizing that the team is splitting off. There's a large enough scope. Maybe there is a chance for you to build a management structure underneath you. But this is not something that you want to try to push when the business context doesn't exist for it because that will end in tragedy. That'll end in those teams not being able to produce any value. The organization would shut down that, you know, that effort probably pretty quickly. If they find out that the work isn't there for it, right? So it's unlikely that you're going to get promoted into, you know, a high level management role or even a principal level role as an IC, if the business context isn't already needing that, right? That's that's kind of the key, you know, one of the key blockers here. The second key blocker, and it's one that you can take a little bit more action on. The second key blocker, especially as you get into more senior roles, is your ability to go to the outside layer. All right, what do I mean by that? The outside layer. If you think about your career journey, starting all the way back, when you were, you know, maybe an intern level, even everything that you did on day one as an intern. Everything you did on day one as an entry level engineer was focused on yourself, right? You're focused on your own skills, your own learning journey, your own productivity. You're focused on trying to do the right thing, listening to your manager and doing what they're asking of you, listening to feedback from other people, but ultimately your job is to make sure that you were doing the right thing. And sometimes you didn't even know the right thing to do. And so when you did the wrong thing, your job was to focus on identifying that and trying to make yourself better, right? So then you kind of start getting comfortable with the skills you are learning how to write code, you're learning how to test, you're learning how to deploy, you're learning a little bit about the domain, and you still have to ask for a lot of help, you still have to ask for a lot of review, but you finally get that promotion into, you know, instead of an entry level, maybe your mid level, right? So now your responsibility scope grows a little bit. The tolerance for you to make mistakes goes a little bit down. And the expectation that you're going to, for example, share your opinion goes up. So now instead of only looking inward, at the very least, you know, at this promotion level, you're starting to look outward, you're looking at other people's code, you're providing your opinion on it, you're checking their code rather than only writing your code, right? You are participating in things like retros and providing ideas for maybe how can the team do a little bit better in this area, that area. You may even be branching out and showing the work that you've done, you know, in some kind of public forum, maybe you're demoing the work for a stakeholder, right? And so you continue to get more and more confident with kind of participating on the team and sharing your ideas with the team, and then you move into a more senior role eventually, right? And the senior role, you really start looking outward even more and becoming responsible for things outside of your own work a little bit more. So what do I mean by that? You might start mentoring people. You might start providing more code review on more complex things. You may start, you know, and by this time you're probably participating in a non-call rotation, you know, you're developing kind of a community responsibility, right? You may even be held responsible for the delivery of a project that you're not the only person working on it, right? So, you know, you're kind of being held as the directly responsible individual, and your job is to deliver on that project. So you're going to keep walking on this pathway as a senior. And if you notice, you know, as we started out at the very center of this, where we're only focused on ourselves, only focused internally, and then we continue expanding out, expanding out, expanding out, expanding out. Our focus continues moving away from us, right? Our impact continues moving away from us, our responsibility continues moving further and further out, right? And what people rely on us for continues to move further out from just our internals. So your responsibility, your various responsibilities, you know, if you look at a job description for each of these levels, as you go further and further out, you know, or rather as the levels increase, you're going to see more and more language about where that impact is, right? So the day-to-day management of yourself and of, you know, of deliverable work, you know, the more senior you become, that becomes less and less the kind of high leverage that you have, right? The leverage that you have when you're a mid-level engineer is largely linear in the sense that you're delivering one piece of code followed by another piece of code followed by another piece of code. The more you can multiply, the more the further out you go, right? So if you are a senior engineer, you may be wondering, well, I've gotten to the place where I'm multiplying and I don't know what to do. I'm reviewing other people's code, I'm mentoring people. Your next job is to figure out what the next layer is. What is the next layer out? And this is going to be different for each person and for each situation, but the pattern remains, right? Because it's very unlikely that if you just delivered something more complex, or if you delivered something faster, or if you learned another skill, it's unlikely that those are the things that are going to get you to the next level, which again is not intuitive. We learn this over and over and over. People tell us over and over and over that learning is the pathway to growth. And that is partially true, but you have to learn something new in this situation. You're not learning a hard skill. You're learning how to think about your situation more strategically, how to have more leveraged impact on the situation that you're in. So that might mean more impact on how engineers work with product. It may mean improving some kind of workflow, maybe having an impact on cost. You hadn't really thought about cost. You left that up to platform, or you left it up to some other part of the organization. Maybe you can help those things work better together. Now you're moving beyond and you're finding the outer layer. At some point, you're going to continue going to the outer layer to the point where now you're having conversations with more general business need leaders. This might be head of product or head of engineering where they're talking to about more systematic issues. And you're no longer working kind of counterintuitively. Again, your coding work goes down. You're not doing as much direct delivery. This picture has kind of changed over the years. The traditional manager picture has shifted to look a little bit more like these high level IC roles where you're actually trying to affect change at this level. You're still producing something, even though it may not necessarily always be code. With the advent of things like Clog Code, you're seeing more of these roles that are producing code, but they are still finding the outer layer. So it's going to depend on your organization. It's going to depend on the norms that you're all developing at the company that you're in. But overall, those are the two roadblocks. There's either the organization is not ready for the role. And you are in an awkward position. There's things that you can do in that situation that we can talk about in the next couple of episodes. So the organization is not ready or you have not found the outer layer in your current role. So you're performing very well with those inner layers. In fact, you're performing so well that you're almost becoming disposable to those inner layers. That is a potentially terminal role if you continue performing at that level and you don't find out in an outer layer, then you're unlikely to kind of move up in your career, move up to the next level. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. Thank you again to Unblocked. If you are reviewing code with AI tools in your left unsatisfied, if you have a bunch of kind of backlog of PRs from an AI review code review tool and you're leaving them unmerged because they're just not good enough. And then you may want to try Unblocked. You can try it for free. Try it totally free at getunblocked.com/developerti. It's getunblocked.com/developerti. You're going to get three weeks free trial. Go and check it out. You can get more context in those categories. Thank you again for listening to today's episode of Developer T. If you enjoyed this episode, then go and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using. We're also doing YouTube very consistently now actually. So this episode is on YouTube and in fact we tend to release the YouTube episodes before we release the podcast episode. So there's a little incentive for you to go and subscribe in YouTube. It's just developer T on YouTube. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.