Comment by stillworks

This makes sense and here is slightly different perspective to this.

The company I was at had this haloed culture of promotions and I saw people sat on a certain IC level for over 5 years chasing the carrot. Some of them were close to a decade at the same level.

Now, this company had several sub-orgs and it was possible to switch positions to a different team or an entirely different sub-org altogether. And guess what ? No up-leveling and no salary hikes because the overall company doesn't allow the sub-orgs to compete with each other.

Fair enough. Makes sense. If they allowed it, it would be chaotic.

But for some reason, their is a culture of making employees compete with each other ! To the point that the apparent lowest performer will be asked to leave the company ! (There are other ramifications to this "system" but this is not the discussion for those)

The lesson I learnt was to chose your battles wisely and be prepared for interviews every single day... because in a way it indeed felt like everyday I was interviewing/competing for the job I already had... why not dial it up to eleven ?

Once you feel prepared, then actually simply start interviewing. This year I am targetting at least six (once every two months) solid interviews. The more multi-stage-loops the better because that gives me the chance to politely drop out of the process at any stage. The more leetcode hards the better because leetcode hards are set in a specific way and the interviewer has to be super smart to follow up with something novel.

This way, I think (correct me if I am wrong) I am implicitly up-skilling and getting better at my job AND in a state of preparedness to walk away if I felt I needed to.

Managers be managing and all that $h1t... they have their jobs to do, I have my life to deal with as well. I will control what I can control.