I was talking recently with a friend who has ~30 YOE in the tech industry. He said that as far as he remembers, up to, say 2010, chasing promotion wasn't "a thing" like it is today. That is, people did work towards becoming managers and such, but it wasn't so institutionalized as it is today, where every big tech company has internal leveling, and employees put significant effort into advancing through the levels. So for the more tenured folks here, what is your opinion about it? Do you feel the same? If yes, what changed in your opinion that made the promo chase what it is today? #engineering #software #career #promotion
Pay used to be much lower even at the senior levels. Less incentive for chasing promo when the rewards are not as large
Since blind happened!
Promo used to be an organic part. 10 yrs ago, it was more about working on something you like, good colleagues, manager, and if you deliver, then promotion happened naturally in due course. There was no chase
This. And now people build useless stuff just for promo and jump after getting promo. Companies are losing a lot more in this setup imo..
My manager has spent 1+ year by now just on designing a framework and implementation would take about a year. This framework, while it has potential, there are more basic things that are broken, that I would fix first. But no! He wants to "lead" this project to make a case for his promotion.
Apart from the other reasons already listed, most people these days join the tech industry solely for money & are not really interested in the domain itself. Earlier it was mostly "geeks" who loved to work on these things. Hence, you get this insane obsession of jumping every few years or being ruthless to your teammates mostly to chase more TC. It's sad to see the ones who want to concentrate on the actual tech part of it being left behind in the process.
Every manager at amazon tells you, no tc bump unless you are promoted. So here we go.
As soon as tech companies started laying people off despite their strengths and expertise due to lack of visible “value”
Once you lay out the rules for the game people are going to try to win
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After 2008 Great Recession Wall Street jerks moved to Tech and brought their career progression obsession/TC chasing with them. My observation is the same, 10-15 years ago it was about working with smart folks on cool technology. Promotions and money came second
Interesting point if view. Haven't thought about it.
Maybe it’s also the crazy TC that started happening around the same time. I remember pay was good relative to other careers back then but not the crazy amounts people get today by joining FAANG and leveling up.