Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 179: Pushing preemptive promotion and de-motivated by promotion

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello! I love listening to your show. I often relisten to old episodes. I’m a Front End Developer at an IT consulting company. I will be reaching my 1 year anniversary at the company in March (it’s September right now). How do I talk to my manager about a promotion? I would like to become a Sr front end Developer. I have never had to have this conversation because I have always changed jobs before reaching 1 year with the company. I need help on how to start the conversation. Thank you! A member of my team asked for a promotion; we discussed and it was decided that if we worked on a set of core skills we could push for the promotion in a few months time. Since this conversion they have lacked motivation and productivity has dropped. What should I do now?

it takes more than replacing a spreadsheet with a buggy inflexible poorly supported custom app to be a great software engineer this is episode 179 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and never have I ever replaced a spreadsheet with the worst thing. The closest I've come to that is I built an app that slurped in a spreadsheet

and took the actions that were specified in the spreadsheet. It's funny because you hear this trope about how spreadsheets are like a product validation for you. If you see an organization using spreadsheets for something, then you go and you build a custom app.

But spreadsheets are really good and it's really easy to build something that's worse than a spreadsheet. And now people are mad at you and you have to like do bug fixes when instead they could just go edit a field and fix it themselves and stuff. I don't know.

Spreadsheets. They're pretty cool. They're not just for adding stuff anymore. Do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons? Yes, I'd like to thank those that are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every week. They are Matthew Voidovich,

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three digits of awesome humans sharing really good advice for each other on work and even non-work stuff. Really sold that, didn't I? You did. uh i believe you encompassed all of human achievement good things related to work and other things all right i'm gonna read our first question this is from an anonymous listener hello i love listening to your show i often re-listen to old episodes i'm a front-end

developer at an it consulting company i will be reaching my one-year anniversary at the company in March. It's September right now. We're not too slow. Yeah. How do I talk to my manager about a promotion? I would like to become a senior front-end developer. I have never had to have this conversation because I've always changed jobs before reaching one year with the company. I need help on how to start this conversation. Thank you. Wow. Okay. Let me just call out one thing here. So I often re-listen to old episodes. I've been hearing tweets lately of people saying that they have listened from the beginning, from the start of our show all the way to now. It's like 170 well this is 179 so like 179 episodes and i'm thinking to myself that is a lot of

listening to us and i just feel like i need to apologize there is a fork in the road there you could have said you're welcome instead you said i'm sorry well i took the honest fork that's what 90 hours give or take of roughly half an hour for each episode yeah that's a lot of time i mean oh boy that's great i think that's cool maybe skip the first one if you're starting over the audio quality is pretty rough on that first one that is true okay so our question asker yes how do i start this conversation do not start by saying hey i've never stayed at a company for more than one year so i've never had to do this before right there's some issues with this with what with the situation the situation i'll reach my

one year anniversary how do i talk to my manager about promotion i'd like to be a senior front-end developer so yeah one of the issues is the the short tenure times i think that's probably something i don't know if you want to bring it up in the conversation but it's it's probably on your manager's mind if they know your previous employment history yeah probably i think that also the the question asker said i've never had to have this conversation and that's true like generally promotion cycles require you to be around longer at a company and being there longer doesn't guarantee promotion but for most people at most places you need to be there for a while unless they make a pretty big mistake in either and and way under hire you right so you're saying

it that tenure is necessary but not sufficient yes that is one of my favorite phrases by the way it just rolls off the tongue i know when when you say it it does it really doesn't it's kind of hard to say necessary but it's hard it's hard to say how many s's and c's are in there it's like i think there's an old dimitri martin bit about he can never figure out how to say the word banana because he bana that's too few na's bananana is too many i get hung up saying the word necessary because i'm worried i'm gonna misspell it with your tongue yeah exactly i'm like if i miss oh crap i'm not actually writing and now you've been silent in the middle of the word for a couple seconds yeah

think that and it got weird like what's wrong with dave he just does that every time he says the word necessary he just halts and panics okay yes so tenure tenure is necessary but not sufficient and i think at different companies being a senior developer can have very very different meanings and very different criteria and i'll just give an example at a startup i worked at in management we had someone come to us and say hey i'd like to i've noticed that there are lots of senior engineers on the team and I would like to be a senior engineer too. And literally the process went like this. Okay, hold on one second. Picked up the phone, called HR and said, Hey, can you change this engineer's title to senior engineer? And they were like, sure, no problem. I'm like,

okay, done. You know, you're good. I worked at a small startup and there was a developer I worked with who was very, very talented, but had a shorter tenure than me and also had been programming less than me but i think objectively was just like a better developer and i went and looked at their linkedin one day and it said senior software developer and i was like oh like you could just like say stuff cool and i think that's when i started really doubling down on my like post modern job titles i used to have for a while i think i was the archduke of computering for a long time and i think one of my friends was the chief quantum complexity officer or something really in a world with titles like that doesn't senior engineer just feel kind of boring so i

used to think titles were nonsense and then i realized that titles are an important signal when you don't have built-in other signals so if you are from an underrepresented group then titles are actually super important because people just on average will take you less seriously or might denigrate your experience or assume you know less than you do so if you have a title that's kind of like a shield against some potential discrimination but i was totally blind to all that back then i was just like titles are dumb i'm cool i'll make up nonsense i'm the archduke of computering i do it yeah it didn't hurt me so i've kind of come full circle i've swung from titles are useless that's not full circle i did the other thing i've swung from

titles are useless to titles are important and valuable and and done well can help help correctly signal about expertise. You've swung half circle. I've swung half circle. Okay. I've spun 450 degrees to face the other way, but still do a full circle. With a weird pit stop on the way back where you started, but kept on going. Yeah. I have also come to that same conclusion. So I used to just think titles were nonsense. They only were necessary if you had some kind of like egocentricity about you or some kind of unappetizing desire to look good in front of others and then i went to work for a large company oh yeah and then i realized that i interact with so many people that i just can't keep track and i can't form a personal relationship where i know

you and i know your abilities and i know what you do i can't do that like i literally work with a new person four or five times a week and so the title helps tell me like all right not just the role like okay are you a manager are you an engineer are you a program manager not just that But the level within that role, whether it's, you know, junior, senior, principal, whatever, I need that information to know what scope of problems I can bring to you and what kind of thing I can expect from you. Like in a startup, I would just rely on my personal knowledge of your abilities. Like I just would naturally have that. But I just can't do that here. It takes too long.

Yeah. I've led us on a merry tangent down into titles. And this is they're asking about promotion, which is only tangentially related to titles. Oh, yeah. But it was fun, though. Sorry. And you're welcome. I recommend we swing full circle back to the question.

OK, OK. Maybe 720. Yeah, we're really good snowboarders. So that's the thing we can just do. Cool. I think that getting back to how you talk to your manager about the promotion is number one, you need to understand what are the criteria that your company uses to assess who's a developer, front end developer, who is a senior front end developer.

And the way you can do that is talking to your manager. And I would probably start the conversation not by saying I want to get a promotion, but rather by saying, how do you assess these levels at this company and trying to get something written if possible? But that's where I would start the conversation, not I want to get promoted. I would start with that instead. Why? Because I think you need to understand the landscape you're walking into. Like, why do you want to be a senior front end developer? And the answer might be, I like the title.

The answer might be, I like the pay. The answer might be, I want more responsibility than I have. but until you understand what senior front-end developer means at your company it might not meet your criteria whatever it is yeah i think if you ask them what it means then they will just assume you want to get promoted though like why else would you yeah fair fair point i don't think you can ask that question without communicating i want to get promoted i was going to say the opposite i was going to say you need to tell them explicitly hey i would like to get promoted because if you wait until you want the promotion to happen to say hey i want to get promoted it's

pretty likely that it's not going to happen right that second and it'll turn into some amount of work to do over a period of time and so the clock kind of starts when you bring it up explicitly i just want to call out how prophetic you are right now because this actually is foreshadowing for our next question oh yeah okay uh that's all i'm gonna say about that no spoilers okay so i think also as a manager i i'm trying to develop folks in my team and give them things that will stretch them and grow them. But there's a difference in how you approach it when you know someone wants a promotion and they're working for it. Promotion is one axis of growth and you have to approach it a very specific way often. What do you mean very specific way? So just improving as

a developer is often not all it takes to get promoted. So if you just want to get better, that's fine and you can do stuff. You can work with someone to help them get better. But if they want to get better because they want to get promoted, there's a different approach to take there it's it's just as much about communicating why you deserve it as like working to deserve it does that make sense i don't know sorry i'm not trying to trying to think through that so like if someone came to me and was like jameson i really want to learn about docker that's how i want to grow like cool we have docker related things we can work on those things but if they're not saying it but the reason they want to learn about docker is because they feel

like learning more about docker will help them get promoted that might not be accomplishing their actual goal i see so you're saying tell your manager what your destination is not the stepping stones you think that will get you there i think so and and i think they can help you identify areas to improve specifically geared towards promotion not just towards general growth as a human because they're not the same thing at all like just getting better it doesn't automatically get you promoted generally yeah if you get like better enough then it probably will but if you want to get promoted you can probably get less better this sounds so cynical when i say it there's a lot of communication and sharing of knowledge and impact involved in promotion in other words the

boxes that you need to check at your company that will lead you to a promotion may not be the same boxes that you think will help you grow or get better necessarily i think so i think that's what i'm saying and i feel bad saying it but also i think it's the truth like i don't know yeah and And this is why at the very beginning of this discussion, I said, you really need to figure out what you want and then figure out what promotion will give and see how well those things align for you. I'm like feeling guilty about all the stuff I just said. Do you feel like that just means that I only work at bad companies?

Like, I feel like I've never seen a promotion process that's just like, just flour, you know, and we will pluck that flour and place it in the senior engineer vase. oh so you're the flower is that what you're saying yeah yeah you just blossom as a as a human you know just focus on getting better and and that will just that'll just naturally it'll just happen well i once had a very experienced engineer say to me that the ideal promotion process at any company is that the engineer does amazing work adds lots of value does a lot of really cool things grows a lot develops their skills and then suddenly one day your manager appears and says by the way you're promoted i'm gonna pay you more and give you more responsibility good job

yeah they're the promotion fairy they just float on over in a like grandmotherly way with a wand senior yeah exactly and then whatever happens happens your laptop sparkles a little brighter i think i think the reality is that the same people who receive promotions are the same kinds of people who interview very well and it's the same kind of selection bias problem that we have with interview processes although it's a little different in the promotion world because you have a lot more data usually years of data yeah but i think it's kind of a similar problem where it's like do you interview well or do you do a good job and are those you know the venn diagram of those two skill sets they do overlap in some people but not all yeah i think you're saying

what i was trying to say in many words in fewer words i just said the word venn diagram and that clenched it for you i'm just a big fan of those shapes i love it there are some great venn diagrams let's be honest i think fondly to some of the venn diagrams i saw in my youth they really shaped your childhood into a circular oval well let me let me just say this one other word of warning is that the promotion process varies so much from company to company and even the fact that people want to get promoted varies so much from company to company that you just have to do some groundwork and i'd recommend talking to people who have been promoted and ask them like why did you do it what was the process

like and if you feel brave say what do you think i need to do to get down that same road yeah i think in general some visible project success is a is a pretty common thing to point to like i did thing i did thing that you've all heard of yes ah and then you pound your chest and then big impact things happened yeah big impact large dollar or small dollar or whichever direction you're trying to right grow dollars reduce dollars yeah dollar small now and then you i think i guess you're the hulk the promotion hulk hulk smash budget hulk grow revenue hulk smash 95th percentile latency yeah i would want to work with hulk engineer oh yeah so that's very generic advice of like

do things that have large impact and then tell people about them but i do think you need to dig into the promotion process and let your manager know because depending on the company there's some amount of homework that goes into it of prep and kind of like getting your name out there in meetings to the right people beforehand it can turn into a cold interview versus an interview where you know someone at the company already yes kind of like what dave said where if you just submit your resume some people get hired that way but it's certainly much harder than if you have connections there already and the same thing happens with promotions there's some promotion group or committee that reviews stuff often if they've heard of you and know of your impact and

your manager has been talking about you for a while then they have context instead of just whatever random documentation they prepare right in that moment and on that subject last thing i want to advise on this is to keep a work journal do like a year in review or a quarter in review where you write down frequently the things that you've done that were good that you can have as a quick reference because i can tell you when you sit down with your manager after a year or two working at a company and they're like well what have you done that's promotion worthy and you're like i just can't remember you know i for whatever reason yeah so do that and then you'll have a nice piece of content you can draw on to make your hulk smash impact case i'm trying to find this

blog post i think we've even referred to it by julia evans i don't know she has a blog post that basically says that thing you just said keep a list of your accomplishments both to help you remember and to submit to your manager so so that you make sure you you aren't biased by recency yes well have we helped the question asker question answered good luck and i think you'll find the next answer to our the next question also kind of interesting so stay tuned sure do you want to read our next question sure this comes from an anonymous listener who says a member of my team asked for a promotion we discussed it and it was decided that if we worked on a set of core skills we could push for the promotion in a few months time since this conversation they have

lacked motivation and productivity has dropped what should i do now i noticed a dynamic here in the question that i didn't notice the first time i read it which is why doesn't the managers just say sure like they support their team part of their goal is to kind of help people grow their career what incentives do they have to not just say like yeah you want a promotion i'll push for it right now let's go does that make sense yes i'm just thinking i guess i have an answer so this is rhetorical but i'm wondering if your answer is better than the one i have in my head well i was thinking if they said we'll push for a promotion in a few months time and that demoted debated them maybe they should say oh never mind we'll push for a promotion in a few years time

and then maybe motivation will go up i was kidding by the way like reverse psychology kind of yes i don't know having the promotion play hard to get is this like promotion negging i think what the manager wants is to make sure you are a strong candidate for promotion when they push for you to be promoted because it reflects on them it reflects on their judgment if they're just pushing for someone to be promoted who is judged to not merit it that's that's saying like your bar is low maybe your team has some issues and you don't recognize them there's some kind of implicit negative consequences there of pushing when someone isn't ready does that make sense yeah for sure it looks bad like you had bad judgment

if they turn out not to to be successful in the new role it also dilutes the role for other people who are operating at that level you know yeah and and i think most companies have a practice of saying look when you meet this certain criteria that's when you will be promoted now obviously there's a ton of wiggle room there and there's probably a ton of examples of people who have just slipped right on through for other reasons but still like that's that's kind of the standard yeah they lacked motivation their productivity has dropped i wonder if they were expecting to say can i be promoted and hear a yes yes that's what i and then they heard they heard a no like you said not right now we need to work on these things or not even not right now you said yeah

let's work on these things to make you a strong candidate and in their mind that was a failure because they they didn't get a promotion that they asked for yeah and it could very well be that the core skills that the manager said you need to work on might have come as a surprise it's like negative feedback you know yeah hey you're not good in these areas not good enough and that can be pretty demotivating to hear if you're not prepared for it so so now the question i think is from the manager though what do we do to bring this person back into full motivation and productivity and overcome this funk do you think it's worth addressing directly i mean you could just say hey i noticed since our conversation about promotion you seemed demotivated and less

productive does it feel like you won't achieve your goals or i don't know maybe you don't even need a next question maybe you can just say what's going on yeah that's the kind of question i think a very skilled manager could ask and do a good job navigating the answer yeah but you may or may not get an honest answer there right yeah very hard very hard situation yeah but i would probably ask that question rather than assuming because you are a very skilled manager i am extremely skilled have you seen me manage i don't even see it i just feel like the echoes in the ground as your powerful management energy shakes the earth every step puts out a shock wave of management skill i just feel the stakeholder

value reverberating yeah i think addressing it directly makes sense i also think it's it's probably worth talking about promotion with folks at some point before they say hey can i be promoted yeah some amount of knowledge of what the ladder is like and what the criteria are like feels useful and feels like the more that it's this secretive shadowy thing the more i feel like it has room to go bad but if it's clear and kind of open and you can look at people who went through it and see like oh they're doing good work and i need to be like them or that kind of stuff that feels useful yes totally totally agree and i think what may have happened here is that the criteria were not clear to this employee yeah and so when they came to their manager and were like i want

to be promoted they felt like they already met whatever criteria it was and maybe they're watching other people at the next level and saying i'm doing what they're doing i deserve this yeah i do that i do that too and so when they showed up and got denied and said yeah maybe in a few months they wonder like was this just arbitrary like do you just not like me like i think there's an expectations problem here where it's not clear what the promotion process is in my case like in my company it's it's so clear that it's like this multi-page document that's written out very crisp with lots of examples and i can read that and say i am or am not doing those things now the only question is that sounds amazing by the way like i i assume that most people do not work in

a place like that where there's this is the first time i've seen anything even close to this in you know yeah pushing 20 years of software development now so it's great but what that means is that there's really no question there are still arguments and debates over like i think i do this but the the promotion committee doesn't you know and that that's fine but now you're having a concrete discussion it's not just like uh no i don't think so you know yeah if we worked on a set of core skills i think one thing that could demotivate me is if i felt like it was too vague if there wasn't a clear like you said clear direction of things to do and especially if there wasn't follow-up to if it was just like nah work on these things like be be more assertive i

whatever vague advice you could give. I feel like if you really want to help them and try and motivate them to work towards this, you could work with them to develop some kind of specific things they'll do and follow up on it and some kind of development plan. What I have seen be effective is where you say, look, in the next six months, I see these two projects that you're going to be working on as criteria for you achieving the promotion. If you can deliver these in the scope that we think they're going to have and the impact that they're going to have then you will be right on track for promotion at the end and boy i i've seen that motivate people like crazy where they just really they will they're relentless in getting these projects to succeed to achieve that

promotion yeah and it's super concrete right like it's a there's a delivery you know there's a success criteria yeah but when you just say well the team doesn't really doesn't really like the way you talk in meetings or something it's like what do i do with that yeah so this could lead into more you brought this up earlier too about feedback this could lead into a conversation about giving better feedback yeah i still think you have to talk to them about it oh yeah i mean even if this wasn't related to promotion if someone on your team just suddenly seemed to lack motivation and their productivity dropped it's separate from promotion it's still an issue yeah and i don't think there's any secret tricks around that besides talking to them about it

i think you just want to make it clear that they're not in trouble you're not like gonna fire them i guess unless you are i don't know what you do if you are have the conversation six months earlier if you're already you messed up six months ago i guess if they've been demotivated long enough you're ready to fire them exactly so it's actually very simple they're demotivated their productivity is down which means they're actually working at a lower level now so give them a demotion ah that will really motivate them and everybody on the team then after they work out of the motivation problem then you can promote them now they got the promotion you solve two problems conservation of of promotions right you cannot create or destroy

a promotion like you have to yeah got it yep it's it's just physics look these are laws of the universe we don't make the laws we just tell you about them are you familiar with the history of decimation i mean i know what history is and i know what decimation is but i don't know what the history of the station is so roman legions if they were naughty they would be decimated which means that they would take one out of every 10 soldiers and the other soldiers would have to just like murder the soldier oh and it was just a real big motivator i think in the same vein as what you're proposing for everyone else okay do a good job or else one of you will get you get demoted demoted yeah okay so wait just to be clear there's no actual

murder involved though right just career murder okay okay just yeah got it okay glad we cleared that up have we answered the question i think so you got i think that the bottom line is you got to do something about this you definitely need to talk to them and there's a good chance you as a manager caused this by being unclear or there's a good chance your company culture caused this by having weird expectations that you don't actually have that somehow your employee got that's a hard spot to be in oh yeah if the company is unclear and you want to provide clarity but but it's you can just make up stuff and say hey i think if you do these specific things it'll work but if that's not shared by whatever group decides promotions then that's tough so maybe

that's some homework to do if you're in that situation of working with the promotion group to figure out how to make things more clear if if doing it in general is too broad maybe even just for this person in specific and depending on how dysfunctional your company is congratulations you may have just become the promotion group yeah i think we've solved it you're welcome yeah good luck good luck all right luck what can people do if they would like their questions answered with just apparently really bad advice and unrelated historical metaphors yes go to softskills.audio click ask a question and we will get to it we're getting to them all we appreciate the questions thank you so much for listening thanks for your questions we will catch you next

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