This is going to be a long read. Please do read until the end, to understand the context and help me with constructive suggestions. This has been bothering me and impeding my growth year after year. Every year end conversation, I keep hearing only positives. There is no constructive feedback to improve mainly technical leadership skills. Nor is there any mentorship. When I was at Bloomberg, I was quiet about this and just quit. At my current company for the past two years, I have made sure to be as vocal about this as possible, in terms of wanting feedback and wanting to grow my tech leadership skills beyond a team and operate at a cross team tech lead capacity (Typical Staff / L6 Engineer). But surprisingly it has been the same story. Just positive things in my 6 month reviews, that I lost motivation and stopped investing time on writing my feedback. The reason for that is explained below. In my peer feedback early last year, I very clearly conveyed my aspirations of where I wanted to be. My skip-level manager told me that I have to take control and drive my career, but nothing beyond that around how to do it. I was just asked to mentor new joins in the team and bring them up to speed. I was played down when I was asked if there would be opportunities for growth in people management role also. Prior this review cycle, The EM managing my team left within a month after a critical project started and I drove a project from start to finish that involved a lot of cross team and cross functional collaboration and also playing the role of a lead for my team. We were without an EM for a year and the project was delivered successfully by the team without them. Also, I was a SME for another team prior to this and there were some cross team efforts that I had started. But after moving to the new team ( a fork from the old one), I was completely cut off and disconnected from those initiatives. Fast forward, after the review cycle, the launch of the new platform was super successful and we did a couple of iterations over it too. But during this time, my skip level EM kept cancelling or pushing my 1-1s. I probably had 2 or 3 1-1s until last June last year. Also, I was expecting a baby in the Summer last year. I am offered 6 months of parental leave, but I wanted to go back immediately and try something else, like embedding with another team and learning something new. I found a prospective team, but my skip-level EM stopped it, saying I am playing the role of a lead/EM here and that I am essential for the team. I once again tried highlighting my career aspirations, but received no response. I was so demotivated that I stopped writing my last couple reviews over the last 6-8 months. I decided to take my paternity, and at the end of the paternity, last month, I started interviewing to test and see where I can land. Turned out that most companies were interested to interview me at a Staff role or had a clear path to get there. I ended to landing a Staff Eng offer, with a potential to get upleveled to Sr Staff within a year. Now, I am back to work and I am waiting for a week, to let everyone know that I joined back only to quit. I feel terribly guilty to join work after 6 months of leave and quit immediately within a couple of weeks. And over the last 1.5 years or so, there has been an unfilled Staff Eng position in my team. The EM role for the team that I am in got filled after a year. My skip level chose someone who they worked with before. I wanted to know from all the EMs, Leads and all the SWEs out there: 1) Are there situations where EMs just wont share feedback to improve and grow? If yes, what should the IC do in that situation? 2) What are some of the possible ways of receiving constructive feedback from an EM for an IC? 3) What should the IC do, when an EM repeatedly postpones their 1-1s? Btw, I flagged this and didn't receive a response. I do understand that this person was my skip level and that they have a lot of things to handle. But is this normal? 4) If the EM is vague about growth/tech leadership opportunities and are not giving point answers and taking actionable items, how can an IC communicate effectively to the EM saying that's not how it is supposed to be? Would be great to get answers for the above questions, as I move to my next job, so I don't have to keep switching every two years. Career growth is very important to me as a person. Current TC: 270k YoE: 11 #swe #staffeng #l6 #careers #techleadership
Congrats for the new job, you should always take your career growth in your own hands. Btw can you share new TC? 270 for 11 yoe seems low, looks like Bbg and even your current employer underpaid you.
Yes. My new TC is 510k. Honestly, I was not really bothered about my TC ever in my career. I was always more enthusiastic about learning and growing beyond where I was. Even here, if I got the growth I was looking for, I would have stayed. Sure, career growth has to be in our hands. But how do we hold our Managers accountable for it? Ultimately the decision/push for higher promos come from them.
Pragmatically, opportunities that align with your career aspirations must be available for management to line them up for you. Not saying that your manager(s) actually tried to get you an opportunity because it sounds like they didn't, but some workplaces are better than others about supporting people moving teams or temporarily trying new roles in order to grow.
Right. And what was annoying was there was and is and open role and they still don’t want to promote. Hell, atleast have a feedback loop in place atleast. Any recommendations on what I could have done differently to have been able to get more feedback? Because currently the only source of feedback for me is from my interviews lol
What are your motivations? You've mentioned growth, but you said in another thread that you're not focused on TC, and it sounds like you've already grown significantly in terms of your responsibilities, contributions, and impact across your team and others. Are you looking for an official promotion or change in title? If so, sometimes at larger companies you're playing against the "years of experience" game, or there could be politics you're not aware of. To give an example on the politics: somewhere I used to work, one of my peers was extremely motivated to get promoted and made it clear to our manager that he felt he deserved it. But several other of our peers had spent several years more at our level and hadn't been promoted yet. So my peer couldn't get promoted ahead of our other peers who had even more experience, domain knowledge, and impact, else it would be bad optics and piss people off. Those other people should have been promoted sooner, but they weren't, so it had a political ripple effect.
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Skipping 1:1s is never good, I’d try to find a different manager or job altogether. From my past experience, it just makes you uninspired to do your work and your career growth will also be stunted. I use 1:1s to track promo progress, so if no 1:1s, no growth, so I’d be out of there.
I agree. Though, I am wondering if there's anything that I can do, apart from flagging it and flagging it early? I waited 4-5 months and by then, I shifted focus onto having my newborn. Wondering if I could have done anything different? Btw, I did get a much better job in terms of everything. Just looking to see if there's anything better I could have done.
If flagging it hasn’t done anything then it seems systematic. I’d leave. Generally if it’s an honest mistake or oversight, managers are happy to correct it. Seems like you’re not a priority.