> A complaint I've heard from some folks who are junior is that they can't get promoted because their work doesn't fulfill promo criteria. When they ask to be allowed to do work that could get them promoted, they're told they're too junior to do that kind of work. They're generally stuck at their level until they find a manager who believes in their potential enough to give them work that could possibly result in a promo if they did a good job.
One bit of advice I've given many people I've mentored in the past is to not wait to get assigned the "promo project." It's hard for people to object with "your too junior to do that kind of work" when you've shown them a plan that's on par with what a senior engineer would provide. Sometimes, they might do that anyway, but then the problem lies not with getting the right promo project, it lies with not having a manager who will be a partner in developing your career.
A good senior engineer produces a simple solution to a simple problem. People manufacturing complexity for the sake of promo packets is a huge problem, and managers are often complicit in it because of those career-development goals.
If you’re in an environment where doing complicated things rather than valuable things is incentivised, I think it’s mostly reasonable to do the incentivised thing or to get into a different environment
One bit of advice I've given many people I've mentored in the past is to not wait to get assigned the "promo project." It's hard for people to object with "your too junior to do that kind of work" when you've shown them a plan that's on par with what a senior engineer would provide. Sometimes, they might do that anyway, but then the problem lies not with getting the right promo project, it lies with not having a manager who will be a partner in developing your career.