Comment by realo
8 years ago
This is interesting.
On the one hand, you have been promoted to a new role, so you have reached a compatible level of expertise. You can put that role on your resume and sell yourself.
On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities. How can you list that on your resume !
I am not sure what is the right answer here... but as your new employer I would take your last promotion with a big grain of salt. A resume is not a score sheet of levels accomplished in a game, it is a list of things your have actually done.
At least at Google, the whole point of a promo is that you've been working at the new level for some time before the promo cycle. And the new employer was not really in the equation, I'd already received my offer from them.
I'm not particularly familiar with the system at Google, but at any somewhat decent tech company in order to get a promotion you have to already perform as you would in your "future" role for some time, with higher-level expectations and responsibilities.
For example, is someone with level I is up for level II promo, she/he has to match level II criteria long before actual promotion is due.
That's general HR pep talk.
In reality promotions mostly happen in organizations due to political lobbying with the powers.
Even in these 'decent' tech companies you will see some people getting rapidly promoted and moving up the hierarchy, while genuine performers are stuck in the process and minutiae. Its just what kind of leverage your manager has with the upper management.
This.
I think everyone should at least experience once to what length a company can go in order to keep someone they really need that threatens to leave. It happened once to me: in a 150k people company that had a well defined promotion model very similar to Google. I gave my resignation notice and suddenly all the HR pep talk was out of the roof. I gained two levels and was promoted to director level.I still left but felt stupid I didn't threaten to leave earlier.
It made me realize that there are two types of workers. The ones that will play fair game and believe the HR pep talk, as we just saw in the previous comments, and the ones that realize that the fastest way to go is to bypass this and play politics in order to fastrack it. It is another type of skill.
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Curious, do Google regularly give free stuff to their customers (advertisers) hoping that in a few months those customers will upgrade to a higher service?
Yes, they have free trials of many things.
Which is dumb, because it means that the company is getting a higher level of labor than they're paying for.
There is a very clear right answer here provided you consider promotion from a clean point of view.
A promotion is a _recognition_ that you are _already_ operating at a given level. It's an acknowledgement by TPTB that you deserve a given title.
Anything less than this leads to a result where you may not actually be performing at the level the new title requires, which means you could conceivably be promoted and immediately fail to meet expectations in the new role.
> promoted and immediately fail to meet expectations in the new role.
aka the peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
At Google, you ostensibly must have been performing at the new level for at least six months in order to get the promotion.
The span at the level lower than your performance is accommodated by an excellent bonus and stock refresh.
> On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities.
For what it's worth - that's not necessarily true. Several places I have worked gave promotions in retrospect - after you have been performing the additional responsibilities for a while. It's sort of like a 'dry run' - they want to make sure you can do it before officially thrusting it on you.