So you want to game the system and get promoted?

Getting promoted can be a complex and often unpredictable process. Ideally, career promotions should be based solely on merit, where rewards are proportionate to your proven abilities and individual performance.

However, demonstrating your capability to deliver at the next level involves more than just personal achievement. Factors largely beyond your control, such as the company’s and industry’s current performance, internal bureaucracy, and individual biases, can all have a negative influence on the final outcome.

I recently participated in two promotion cycles at Coinbase. Initially, I was passed over during the mid-year review but secured the promotion on my second attempt six months later. With hindsight, I’ve taken some time to reflect on why I was unsuccessful initially and what changed to lead to success in the following cycle.

By the end of the first quarter, I was responsible for and successfully launched several major feature releases. End users were pleased. My manager was satisfied. I was confident that a repeat performance in the second quarter would all but guarantee me a senior role.

Unfortunately, a team-wide architectural overhaul in the second quarter resulted in code freezes that disrupted code merges and production deployments. Although I had technically completed my assigned tasks, the work was ultimately held up by frozen pull requests and backend dependencies that faced similar issues.

Despite these challenges, the promotion packet was submitted at the end of the second quarter. I hoped that the impact of the re-architecture on the entire team would be considered, even though my Objectives and Key Results (OKR henceforth) were not fully met.

A few weeks later, I received the disappointing news. I was devastated. Not just by the result, but by the feeling that an uncontrollable factor had impeded my progress. The decision left me feeling jaded and resentful. It felt like I was back at square one, and what was to stop a similar scenario from unfolding before the next packet submission?

On reflection, I realised that other engineers had been promoted during this period. This led me to two conclusions: either those engineers managed to overcome the code freeze and deliver results, or they demonstrated competency in areas beyond just meeting OKRs.

This realization underscored that promotion considerations extend beyond individual efforts. As a software engineer, you’ll eventually become responsible for areas you don’t directly contribute to, even as an Individual Contributor. Besides achieving hard results, cultivating soft skills becomes equally important.

So, how did I game the system and secure the promotion? In truth, I didn’t. At least not in that sense. But don’t let the truth get in the way of a good clickbait title.

I’m a lifelong gamer, with a particular soft spot for role-playing games. For the uninitiated, these game provide mechanisms for you to improve core abilities to take on greater challenges. Assuming you are meeting the technical requirements for your next role, I’m going to outline the outside factors that I believe contributed to my promotion, and contextualise them within the core statistics of role playing games.

Special thanks to Chafin Bryant for seeing it through with me 👊🏻

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Strength

Learn to flex. Create a brag list to document your accomplishments. A brag list is an invaluable tool for tracking your smart goals and helping you stay focused throughout the year. Continual progress simplifies demonstrating your value during performance reviews and promotion discussions. Rather than scrambling to recall earlier achievements before the packet submission, this living document will already offer all relevant information and context from when it was recorded. When noting your accomplishments, make sure to highlight the existing problem, what you did to solve it, and the benefits of the result.