Time in Role

Hello everyone! I might be a bit fixated on career development and promotion subjects for the next few months. That is probably because everyone else is too.

If you work for a large-enough company to have a compensation committee then you are likely at the one-third to one-half mark for doing your end of year reviews and performance calibration for your teams. How very exciting!

This week I wanted to talk a little about time-in-role. We previously touched on trying to accelerate your career plans and short-cutting time-in-role using your dry powder stores. This week let’s ask about the other extreme:

How much time is too much time for you in any one role?

Of course, the higher up the leadership ladder you climb, the longer your time-in-role becomes. If everyone shared the same time-in-role guidance, every company would be half full of vice presidents and staff engineers, or their equivalent. It should also be noted that getting title progression and getting career scope progression is a means for retaining people.

If you move people up the ladder too quickly you risk losing them when they are in their prime and have the most authoritative knowledge for your teams and products. This is very risky and very expensive in terms of tribal knowledge retention. Some companies use fast promotions as a retention gimmick. If they have sat down and figured out the expected churn for their average new hire, then they may accelerate career milestones for people to keep them engaged for an extra year or two.

The downside is that it may encourage itchy feet for people who are not getting their desired promotions or increases in responsibilities.

If you are working at a company that does frequent or consistent promotions, I would recommend making sure that there is an honest conversation between a manager and all of his team members on what their expectations are around promotions and new responsibilities. I will confess to being late to helping one of my team get a desired promotion fairly recently. In my own defense, I was new to the team and we did not discuss it amongst his goals for the year. At some companies, correcting that kind of issue may take a year or more, the more senior the candidate is.

If you move people up the ladder too slowly then you risk losing them before they have the opportunity to maximize the return on your knowledge investments in them.

If you are working at a company that does infrequent or inconsistent promotions then you run the risk of driving your talented rising stars out of the organization. Some of this may be as a result of working previously at a company with frequent promotions. If you have people who are conditioned to have frequent level-ups and have not communicated with them about the pacing of their career and when they can expect it to change (slowing down, usually) then you run the risk of them looking for greener pastures and creating churn for your organization.

Finally, you might have someone who should not be moving at all. Some people gravitate towards a certain potential level and are perfectly happy staying there. I struggle with this personally, because I do not identify with being perfectly happy at work. I have been conditioned by years of startup roles to be very uncomfortable at work and finding ways to push change and growth for the teams I work with and the software they work on.

So what does that really mean?

Generally you can expect that a first-time software engineer should be in their role for one to three years before getting some additional level-ups and/or increases in responsibility. It is interesting to me to see how there has been some “title inflation” over the years. Several years ago, “Senior Engineer” meant 7 to 10 years of professional experience as a software developer, and now reflects more like 3 to 6 years of professional experience. Many places have titles such as “Principal Engineer” or “Staff Engineer” that formerly represented 15 to 20 years of experience and now is more like 7 to 10 years of professional experience.

In addition you might find some companies have special titles that are at the top of the chart. “Distinguished Engineer”, a title at Zynga, is a good example of this.

Some companies will have a leveling system to include some intermediate milestones on your career progression. I am a fan of this model. If you can break down people’s promotions into smaller pieces, it gives you a lot more tools as a manager to work with people and keep them happy and growing. You might see “Software Engineer” as a band with a number after it. Some places have three bands (I, II, III) and some places have more like ten bands (1-10).

Your current employer might have different definitions or expectations for their titles and teams. That is totally reasonable. These are things I have observed as accepted patterns for engineering titles and promotions.

This is also not a “one size fits all” model. Some people reach a professional plateau and stay there, either consciously or unconsciously. I do try to talk to people about their career goals and what I can do to help with them when they are in this situation. Sometimes I have tools to help advance people along their path, and other times I may not have those tools and have to help come up with a plan for how to keep their work interesting and relevant.

If you have questions or concerns about your current role, or how to get to the next level, you should absolutely talk them over with your manager. I would recommend avoiding setting up ultimatums for career progression. Sometimes things might be out of their control. What I would recommend instead is working with your manager to come up with a step-by-step plan to demonstrate you are ready for additional responsibilities or a new title. Sometimes there are clear lists of things you can do in order to demonstrate you are ready for it. Sometimes it is more ambiguous and you will need to work with your manager to understand what decision-makers need to see or hear before they can give you a promotion.

If you have asked your manager about how to get into a new role or earn new responsibilities, you might not get the answers you are seeking. It is easy to read into that and think that your boss does not like you. Before you reach that conclusion, you might want to ask yourself some questions.

Are other people getting promoted?

If no one is getting promoted then there could be business headwinds that are keeping everyone stuck for a while. If there are very few people getting promoted it may also mean that there are some caps on either budgets or title allocations that need to be navigated. These might be more common than you might think.

Am I not responding to feedback?

This one is a personally frustrating one for me. I quite often give people very direct feedback, both verbally and in writing, about things they need to change or improve in order to progress. When I see someone partaking in destructive behaviors or ignoring my feedback about some of their professional habits then it is harder for me to lobby for them to get a promotion. I have tried to couch some people out of habits that are destructive for meetings, and provide communication guidance to other people to help show they are ready for more responsibility. If your peers are consistently giving you heavy guidance on your code reviews, or your features are slipping due to quality or system scoping reasons, these may also be soft forms of feedback that you need more time in your current role.

Is my manager looking out for my interests?

This one is a lot harder to figure out. I have had good managers and I have had bad managers. It is easy to be confused about what kind of manager you have. Sometimes a good manager is hard on you to help you change some of your habits and can feel like a bad manager. Sometimes a bad manager is trying to be your friend and not helping you grow professionally and may wind up feeling like a good manager. There are lots of ways to find out if your boss is looking out for you and trying to help you grow. Whenever I have a new boss I try to give them a year of grace to learn what kind of boss they are. I generally can tell in a month or two, but I think that there is some level of professional courtesy merited in a working relationship even if you decide early on that you have a bad manager.

Do I want to be promoted?

Now that we have gone over all of the external factors, let’s stare into the mirror for a while and consider all of the internal factors. Clearly we all like raises. Do we all like new responsibilities? We may just be comfortable with our current job. This gets tricky. Sometimes the person who “just does their job” does not get rewarded at the same pace as someone who is thirstily climbing to find their local maximum. What you might find is that your cost-of-living adjustments and what the actual cost-of-living is do not line up. Over the years, you might also become frustrated at seeing other people reaching higher professional altitudes and clearly making more money for it. You will find that eventually someone in this position will want to move out of your team or possibly even out of your company. The sad and frustrating part is that you might not be in a position to do anything about it as a manager.

Have I done this job for too long?

Now that we have taken a look into the mirror, let’s go deeper and stare into the abyss for a moment. What happens when you get stuck? For example, If you were a Flash developer up until now, you are in for a rough year. The Flash web browser implementation was finally taken out behind the shed and put down this year once and for all. If you have spent the past six years as a senior software engineer making games in Flash, you are going to have a hard time finding a new role either at your current company or at a new company. I have worked with many people who are specialists in technologies that have fallen by the wayside. There are no easy answers here. If you have spent too much time with one technology or on one team then you are going to struggle to get into something new and exciting without spending some time showing that you can adapt to a new situation. It will be hard to establish that proof, especially if you have spent many years in that role and have gotten extremely comfortable.

I know this is not an exhaustive list. These are pains I have experienced myself or pains I have witnessed in my teams and peers. I hope you look at this list and think long and hard about what your current time-in-role is, and what your next steps should be.

As always, thank you for reading along! I generally get five to six direct responses to these articles each week and I am grateful for all of the dialog that ensues. See you next week everyone!