Comment by BeetleB
2 days ago
> My manager’s job is not to manage my career.
But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".
At my very large enterprise, a managers job is not to "promote and demote" it's to "get you where you want to be". That requires you to know your direction (to the article) but importantly, when they say "based on our company policies, you need to demonstrate an outsized inpact" you're going to have to work with the manager to define that, execute, and get the data to equip them to do that.
Yes, that’s true. But that only happens if you give them something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior to AWS.
While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.
At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.