Sarah MeiVerified account

I guess I’m curious, how this effects your trust in people you work for

I trust individuals’ intentions (if they’re good folks to begin with), but I don’t trust the system they’re embedded in. I also realized recently that I don’t expect people to understand or counteract their own bias. This is a problem. I’m working on raising my expectations

this thread demonstrates and reinforces that I work for a great company that takes cares of its employees.

how many times did you ask for a promotion?

Why do you ask?

I can't speak for him, but I was going to ask this, too. Women + people of color tend to be timid about asking for raises and/or promos, and instead rely on people to just recognize and reward our work. But usually our work is taken for granted, and we get more responsibility...

...but not the equity, pay, and/or title upgrade. People just figure we'll do the extra work for free, and not inquire. At Facebook, I was promoted a cycle after I specifically made the case for it and had metrics, but knew it would be a harder sell the next time.

The only promotion I got was without asking. At the place that demoted me in a reorg (higher pay-level position but reduced to junior to not adjust my pay) I proved I could do it and asked. Response was "that would be unfair to your coworkers" & a constructive dismissal attempt.

That second experience is horrible! I'm sorry that happened to you.

tbh I don't think this is unusual or limited to women. I've been in the industry for 20+ years and I've also only had one or two promotions. The rest was being proactive, changing jobs, managers, that sort of thing. Promotions don't happen in software development it seems :P

Yeah. It seems pretty standard to hold internal staff to an extremely high bar to reach a title but simultaneously hire total unknown outside candidates into the same title without a second thought ... and then wonder how you could possibly have retention problems.

I don't want to take away from this message at all, but the only promotion I've had in my 17 years was a relunctant one, to correct a demotion I took when joining a company. Really annoying.

Isn't this just a software thing? I've always been a contractor, so promotions aren't an option, but what can a developer be "promoted" to? A mgr? For the developer, that's a demotion, and for the company they lose a great dev.

There's a few career paths. To stay in development, senior developer ranks (e.g. in SV, there's often senior, staff, distinguished engineer roles) Technical leadership without people mgr? Lead developer, domain expert roles. People leadership? Eng manager, director etc.

Less hands-on, more system scale work: system architect Promo to technically guide multiple teams: core libraries/toolchain eng/architect Similarly, there's roles broader in scope for people who enjoy working with customers, projects, standards orgs, or new technology bringup.