Faulty engineering career ladders

Introduction

Let’s see several issues with the Engineering ladders I have seen on my 16 years of experience.

This is a long post, I do not recommend reading it in one sitting.

Faulty engineering ladders

Most companies I worked for had some kind of Engineering ladder. It looks nice and promising to know that you can be promoted. However, in my experience there is no clear path for promotion.

No clear way to be promoted

This is one of the most common faults in the career ladders I have seen. All the supposedly clarity of the ladder dissipates when I ask for the promotion process. There are no defined goals, nor a structured process.

Even following all the steps gets you in a cul-de-sac.

Impossible ladder

This is my favorite. In my first company there was no ladder at all for a while and there were no promotions, but I was young and impressionable with career titles. The promotions were given without any process and of course, without any economic reward.

To make matter worse, once the company grew to a 20 developers, the directors decided to create a career ladder. They defined each stage based on the senior developers. That could make sense if they were not forcing skills and knowledge of several roles in the same level. So if you were a backend developer you could not advance in the ladder as you needed to know Angular.js (but you were not given frontend work). The perfect schema to stall promotions.

The presentation of the stages to the developers was funny in a way, as the developers complained about that and the discussion turned up ugly.

No real promotions

Before the Impossible ladder, my first company promoted me every time I asked (more or less), and I would say that there were no real change in my role. At the end of my tenure there I was leading a team of two people, but apart from that the split between junior or senior was just knowing the domain and having more experience. But there was no process, nor any assessment, nor feedback to help me improve.

I was improving because I was reading a lot of technical books/resources, and I ended up doing a part-time masters programme (but that is another story).

Funnily enough, most of my suggestions to improve my work were:

• Implement tests along with the code.
• Use docker.
• Use AWS or other cloud provider.

All of them were answered with a big NO, so once I fixed up my personal life and had another offer, I left without looking back.

Invisible work

If you have the bad luck on being assigned to projects that are not flashy, or are seen as a cost center, you will not promoted.

Taking this in account, developers fall in the CV driven development or try to get inside the team that work on the flashy projects or those that earn more revenue (or are more valued by the company).

So, for example, if you work on operational work and everything works as expected, your have less chance to be promoted than others that work on the in the main area of the company.

Now, there could be some places that are aware of this and are fair when assessing developers, but I have not seen those yet. They exist for sure.

Promotions without a salary upgrade

I have seen this in two companies:

The first one, traditional corporate world, I remember would promote people for 6 months without an increase in their salary. That was a trial they were subjected to by the promotion committee. Total unfairness.

In other companies, the promotions did not imply an increase in salary. So the ones that were promoted were subjected to more work and responsibility for the same salary. If this is your case, stay for a year and leave.

To be promoted you need to be manager

This is one of the most common ones in Spain (and I suspect that in Europe too). Managerial and Engineering are not seen as different ladders in the company. Managers and Developers/Engineers have different set of abilities and “promoting” a developer to engineer because there are no Engineering levels make no sense.

Managers need to have more social skills than developers, and optimize for organization and agreeability. Developers optimize for software quality and developing speed.

Along all my years in the workforce I have seen several horrible managers that:

• Did not like being managers.
• Did not perform well as managers.

But as the only way to be promoted was that, they just were promoted and accepted the new role.

Dominion knowledge vs skills

What about career ladders that value more domain knowledge than engineering skills? This is interesting. Let’s imagine a company with a lot of domain knowledge. You could argue that it is important and it is, but what if the domain knowledge is not about the company domain, but about the NIH tools the company has created?

For me, it makes no sense to penalize newcomers that can bring up new (and better) ways, and reward the old guard that have not improved their skills or at least tried to adapt the tooling to what the rest of the world does.

Who will decide your promotion?

A common issue independently of the career ladder you are presented. The promotion needs to be approved by a committee, your manager, or some group of senior engineers.

Now that I think of, I do not think that your promotion should depend on your manager only. However, being assessed by a group of people that have not worked with me and (maybe) do not even know me is not reassuring.

One could think that using a committee is a more fair approach, but unless they right people are the members of the committee, this will just stall the promotions: on a complain about the non-promotions the gilt could be distributed among all members, and even worse you could not even know who were the members.

Who will vouch for you?

This is related to the issues of the committee shown in the previous point.

The most common sense approach is to have an assessment of your peers, manager, and the people you lead/manage. According to all of that feedback, the promotion committee should consider only that information. They should not rely on their vibes or external factors.

Conclusion

These are some of the malicious patterns that have used companies to stall or simply deny promotions. Be aware that they exists and in case of no path upwards, start applying to other companies. Most of the time, the only way to get more experience and seniority is by just getting a new job.