Manager and I were misaligned about my promotion - How do I remedy this?
In the previous cycle, I wanted to be promoted to senior, but my manager stepped in relatively late into the process to let me know that my promo packet had gaps. Because of this, I wasn't put up for promotion and I'm still at SW2.
This all caught me completely off-guard, and my goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again in the next performance review cycle. How can I make sure that my manager and I are completely aligned going into the next promotion process, and I'm not hit with any last minute surprises?
Discussion
(1 comment)- 122 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
I'm really sorry to hear that - It's never fun being blindsided. 😠Let's make sure that never happens again!
That being said, communication lanes are similar to small children in that they need to be regularly nurtured. In a strong, huge tech company like Twitter, there's always 1 million things going on so people, including your manager, can easily forget to do things (especially proactively). At a high-level, this is what you need to do:
- Create a growth plan with your manager containing the milestones you need to hit to reach senior.
- Check in with your manager regularly (either every 1 on 1 or every other one) to see how that growth plan is going and make adjustments if necessary (e.g. a project on the plan has been deprioritized by leads and should be removed). From my ample experience, growth plan thrash is extremely common among high-performance tech companies like Twitter and Meta. Figuring out whether or not you're on track will require you to share your wins clearly and regularly to get proper credit.
- Have an honest conversation every 2-3 months on how you're trending (i.e. "Am I in bad/okay/good/great territory chance-wise landing the promo?"). The most concrete information you can extract here is to have your manager give you a hypothetical rating (make it clear that you understand that there's a lot of uncertainty here, and you'll take it with a huge grain of salt).
For resources on how to do this, I recommend these:
- "How can I get clarity around my path to senior?" - Q&A from a mid-level engineer at Reddit in a similar situation. I share advice there on how to make this growth plan process as seamless as possible for your manager.
- 1 hour masterclass on navigating your performance review in tech - The advice largely stems from Rahul and I's experience at Big Tech companies, which Twitter is.
On top of the above, I also heavily recommend this huge Q&A on what it takes to be a senior engineer at a large tech company. There are many, many ways to show senior engineer signal, and a ton of them are covered in that thread!
