Comment by tonymet
1 month ago
I’ve participated and appealed to promotions committees at a few big tech companies and the principle for achieving the promotion is sustained performance for a half or 2 at the next level, judged by a number of dimensions. A couple drivers are revenue impact, business direction, or how well you are enabling others to succeed.
If the staff is large enough, calibrations are done to find template team members at the higher level, to make it very clear that the candidates performance is meeting that higher bar.
I think most ICs think “I’ve been working hard, I deserve a promotion”. A better barometer is whether your peers assume you are already at that higher level without knowing your rank.
The problem is when you reach SR the next step is often so far removed that you can't have that impact without not doing your real job. A jr to mid-level engineer: just be better at what you do. However Sr to the next level is a whole different way of working and you can't do those things and also write the code that a sr is expected to write.
Hmm maybe this is a good use case for LLMs to focus more on those higher level objectives.
Until the productivity boost of using LLMs well is just assumed for all ICs.
that's what the money's for