How To Ask For A Promotion
The path to a promotion in the tech industry can be byzantine, random, or downright confounding.
Readers of my earlier post How to ask for a raise are aware of the frustrating catch-22 of a meritocratic environment: if you have to ask, you’re presumed not to deserve it.
It’s true that luck and opportunity play a large role — your best chances of rapid career growth involve working at a high growth company, for a great boss, on successful projects. You can’t command those opportunities to appear, but you can make the most of the opportunities you have.
Be prepared to work hard, grow new skills, improve weak spots, and take on more responsibilities. Otherwise, what you want is a raise, not a promotion.
Switching into management is often regarded as a promotion, but it’s really a change in job function (and beyond the scope of this post.) If that’s your aim, the rest of this post will be interesting but insufficient.
Step 0: Belong to a sane company, have a sane boss
Some preconditions: your company has to have the concept of levels and promotions, and the system must generally intend to promote people for their qualifications (whether or not it lives up to that ideal.)
A boss who views you as a protégé and actively coaches you and your career is ideal, and if you have it, you won’t need this article. But lots of tech industry managers are rookies, overwhelmed with work, or focused on something other than people development. You can work around that. However, your boss must meet some minimum standards: she must view developing people as part of her job, and she has to believe that you possess the potential to eventually reach the next level (even if she isn’t doing anything about it right now.)
If your company or your boss can’t meet this fairly low bar, this post probably won’t help. There are ways to get promotions in toxic environments, but none I’d recommend. My advice would be to change teams and/or companies. (See also the concluding paragraphs of my post on being lucky.)
Step 1: Understand your leveling system
Promotions at tech companies don’t necessarily require a particular job opening for you to move into. Generally you “rise in place” by doing the same job with a higher and higher degree of scope and impact.
Valley tech companies have astonishing homogeneity in their HR practices. If you work for a tech company in the valley, chances are you have a career ladder for software engineers that looks something like this:
New Grad / Entry-level — Can tackle well-defined tasks (like bugs or small features).
Engineer—Fire and forget. You give them a feature or project, they get it done.
Senior Engineer—You give them an ill-defined project with a well-defined goal, and a small team, they get it done.
Staff Engineer — The engineer you’d build a startup or a new initiative around. Compared to senior engineer, both the project and the goal may be ill defined at the outset.
Senior Staff Engineer — Invents new products and technologies, affects company strategy. Solves the problems too hard for senior engineers.
Principal—Luminary expert with profound impact on the company and the industry. In addition to tackling hard problems or inventing new technology, other senior engineers join your company to get the chance to work with them.
If this isn’t ringing a bell, you can find a more complete version of valley engineer levels here.
The conventions on titles or numbering will vary, as will the details of the role. Some companies might emphasize business impact; another might value original technical research, or recruiting.
The bottom line is increasing scope and independence at each level. Hunt down the formulation for your own company (ask HR if it isn’t publicly posted.)
Step 2: Don’t ask for a promotion
In a good company, you don’t get a promotion by asking for it (or by being well-liked, or lucky, or kissing up to the boss.) You don’t even necessarily get a promotion by performing well at your job.
Unlike bonuses or performance ratings, promotions are not rewards. You earn a promotion by possessing the qualifications of the next level.
Step 3: Self-assessment
In Step 1, you figured out the capabilities required at the next level. Now you need to take a hard look at how you compare. Where do you meet or exceed the expectations of the next level? Where do you fall short?
In this process, you must be brutally honest with yourself, because if you can’t see your shortcomings, you can’t address them.
Ask your boss for feedback — giving it is her job! Ask from a sincere place of wanting to learn how to grow and improve. “What skills do I need to develop to make a bigger impact?” not “What do I need to do to get a promo?” Be receptive to what your boss has to say. Even if you disagree with some of it, this feedback falls under the heading of “perception is reality.” If you hear that you have a communication problem, then there’s a communication problem you need to solve to get promoted, even if you have different ideas about the root cause.
Your boss may struggle to give you actionable feedback. Not ideal, but don’t give up — you can get feedback from mentors and teammates, too.
Don’t overlook inventorying your strengths. I’ve had many feedback conversations with gifted employees who have a problem solving mindset and just want to know what to fix. But often it’s your unique gifts that propel you forward, and recognizing and doubling down on your strengths is your best plan. For example, if you learn new technologies really fast, be the one who understands all the parts of the system and how they fit together. If you have a passion for UX, become the go-to engineer for designers who want to collaborate on prototypes. If you are well-organized, pick up some operational blocking and tackling for the next release. Any of these paths can help increase your scope to the next level. The level descriptions are not necessarily a checklist. You can fall short in one area but achieve the “spirit of the level” in total scope by over-achieving somewhere else.
Step 4: Ask for projects
Once you know how you want to grow, there’s only one way to get there: do that kind of work and learn from it. The key to promotion is working on a project at the next level of scope.
Remember when I said that you don’t get promotions by asking for them, or being well-liked, lucky, or anything else superficial? Well, guess what? Often that is how you get projects.
At junior levels, it’s easy. Most projects tend to have headroom to perform at the next level if you go the extra mile. It’s not very hard or very risky for a team lead to give an entry-level engineer some feature-level work to see if he can succeed at the next level.
As you grow, you will need larger and more complex projects to keep learning. Most teams don’t have a ton of Staff-sized projects just lying around for the taking, which makes it easy to plateau at earlier levels without realizing it. You might feel challenged by your work, but ask yourself if you are building new skills to tackle your project, or if it’s just hard because it’s an innately difficult task that requires a lot of work.
Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time — an urgent project is on deck, a battlefield decision is made, you’re thrust into an opportunity for greatness. Sometimes you originate a great idea and you’re given the chance to pursue it. But if opportunity doesn’t knock, you will need to go hunt it down for yourself.
Here is where asking makes a huge difference. Your manager may only have a few of these projects a year. He may not think of you if there’s a more obvious candidate to do it — but he may be willing to take a risk if you ask.
Do the legwork to uncover possible projects that will stretch you in the direction you want to grow, even if they’re outside your immediate team, or not currently in the roadmap. Gather information from your director, or co-workers like PMs who work across teams. Be tactful about asking for a project outside your manager’s domain — you want to make it a win for her, too — but do ask.
If you’re already tackling complex projects that are generally in the ballpark on scope, the “project” may just be an activity you pick up in order to round out your profile. If the missing link is in leadership or charisma, perhaps making time for interviewing, public speaking, or mentoring will fill the gap.
Step 5: Make sure expectations are crystal clear
Is this your job? Nope!
It’s your manager’s responsibility to make sure you and she are on the same page about your career goals and growth. But if your manager is inexperienced or overloaded, she might not be doing that part of her job. If so, you’re better off taking your destiny in your own hands than waiting for her to figure it out.
Once you have a project that’s a good stretch, ask your manager what he’d expect of someone at your level performing that project, and what he’d expect of someone at the next level. Make sure your manager knows you’re shooting to deliver at the next level. I always recommend expressing your ambition in terms of the value you will create for the company (delivering more results by operating at a larger scope), not the value you anticipate receiving (a promotion, recognition.)
This conversation has multiple purposes. It gets your manager to pay close attention to what you’re doing. Remember, to get promoted you must both build new capabilities and also demonstrate them to the promotion decision makers. If your manager isn’t paying attention along the way, it can be hard to change his world-view after the project is over, when it’s harder to untangle the exact impact that came from you.
The conversation also sets up a different kind of feedback loop with your manager. Before, she might only give you course correction if it looked like you were failing to meet her expectations for your current level. Now hopefully she’ll raise her expectations and let you know if you’re falling short at the new level.
It is also a good chance to suss out hidden reservations your manager may have about you. Giving critical feedback is an advanced management skill that your boss may lack, so he may not have told you he thinks your coding standards feud with the guy down the hall is ridiculously immature, even when you asked back in step 3. But if he expresses a lack of confidence in your ambition to operate at the next level, you have another chance to dig for the reason why.
Finally: asking for input and an expression of confidence is fine. But don’t press your boss to promise you a promotion. “Never promise promotions!” is management 101 so you put her in a bad spot. Even if she’s foolish enough to make you a promise anyway, it’s a lose/lose situation down the line. If she does promote you, you take it for granted and aren’t excited when it happens. If she doesn’t, you feel betrayed, rather than focusing on what work you have left to do.
Step 6: Grow.
Do the project. Learn from it. Work as hard as you can to build the competencies you identified in step 3.
Step 7: Get feedback and course correct as you go
By definition, this project is something you do not already know how to do.
You are outside your comfort zone. You will be stressed out, and you will make mistakes. Good news! Making mistakes and fixing them is the definition of a learning experience. The key is to catch them early and course correct so they aren’t fatal. Surround yourself with good and smart people who will tell it to you like it is.
Despite your best efforts, your project may fail, or “succeed” with enough caveats that it doesn’t make a great case for promotion. That is natural the first time you are trying something new, and it shouldn’t diminish your belief in yourself. You will have learned and matured from the experience (probably more than you would have from smooth sailing.)
Chances are, you’ll have accomplished the “growth” part of getting promoted, just not the “demonstrated” part. It means you’ll need a second try (another project), but as long as you absorbed the learning and didn’t deflect it with finger-pointing or excuses, you have good odds of nailing it the second time. Circle back to step 3 and try again.
Step 8: Show your work
Engineers classically forget about (or resent) this step. If the project was a success, why do we have to explain it, why doesn’t the system just recognize our excellence?
The problem is, “the system for recognizing merit” is human judgment. And we humans are all prone to judging a book by its cover, because reading the entire book is difficult and time-consuming.
If you fit the profile of most other staff engineers, you may be able to skip this step because the shortcut of pattern matching will work in your favor. If you don’t look the part (for example, if the other staff engineers are mostly systems experts, and you’re a UX specialist), you will probably have to provide Cliffs Notes of what you did and how you did it.
Boasting about yourself is socially awkward and prone to backfiring anyway. Get other people to do it. If you did the heavy lifting up front of setting your boss’s expectations and getting her feedback along the way, then she’s in a position to summarize for other people. Other mentors or senior engineers in the vicinity of your project (the ones you were getting feedback and input from) are also in possession of the information. So ask for their help in whatever form is socially acceptable at your company, whether it’s recognizing you at a team all-hands, or writing peer feedback for your next performance review.
Is that political? For sure it would be if you exaggerated your accomplishments or asked for testimonials from people who don’t know your work. But if the content is authentic, it’s just plain good communication. Put yourself in the shoes of the promotion committee: how would you expect them to find out information about you?
Step 9: Profit!
You and your manager agreed on what performance at the next level looks like in step 5, you delivered it in steps 6 and 7, and you demonstrated the results in step 8. Give or take a little extra process overhead if you have a promotion committee instead of your boss making the call, a promotion should follow at the next HR cycle.
If that doesn’t happen, see step 0.
