Promotion

Before the criteria were written down, promotions were decided by tenure and a manager's discretion. Two people join the same year; three years later one runs a team and the other is where they started, and asking why produces something about it happening when the time comes. There was a judgment behind it. The reasoning just lived entirely in the head of whoever made it.

Two things break at once when that happens. The person trying to move up has no idea what to do, because "keep doing well" is encouragement rather than direction. And the bar moves from manager to manager. Under a generous one a promotion comes every two years, under a strict one it takes four, and the two people are doing comparable work.

Having exactly one way up was the other long-standing problem. When becoming a manager is the only reward available, a company hands the team to its strongest engineer. That person spends their days on work they didn't ask for and drifts away from what they were good at, and the company ends up with one lost engineer and one unprepared manager.

Promotion became a written procedure to fix those three things. What the next level looks like is spelled out in sentences, a candidate's evidence is collected against those sentences, and several managers decide together. The path up also splits in two, one for managing and one for craft.

A promotion runs through four steps: nominate, gather evidence, review together, adjust pay. Most companies open a window for it once a half or once a year.

1. A manager nominates. Some companies let people apply for themselves as well. Either way, the question at this step is not whether the person could handle the next level but whether they are already working like it.
2. Evidence gets written up. Working through each sentence in the job level table for the level above, attach real examples from the last two or three quarters. If level 4 describes someone who decides what to work on, then finishing assigned tasks well isn't evidence — two or three problems the person found, framed and closed themselves are.
3. Several managers review in one room, for the same reason a calibration meeting exists. When one manager decides alone, promotions cluster under the generous ones, and other teams notice that before anyone admits it. A candidate whose evidence doesn't hold up comes off the list there.
4. Pay is adjusted. A new level means a new salary range, so the number moves inside that range. How large the move is depends on where the person sat before: someone already at the top of their old band can see a bigger jump than someone promoted from the middle of it. Skip this step and only the level in the document changed.

There is more than one direction. The individual contributor (IC) track, where people rise on expertise without managing anyone, sits alongside the manager track, where they rise by taking on people and organizations. Companies that run both keep the salary ranges identical at equal levels. When the money differs, people read only one of the two paths no matter what the document says.

It shows up in companies with a level table, through a window opened once or twice a year. The window exists because the review has to happen with several people in one room. Allow nominations at any time and there is no shared room, which returns the decision to individual managers.

The main input is the performance review. A period's results and capabilities are already documented there, so roughly half the promotion evidence comes out of it. The two are not the same thing, though. A review asks how well someone did at their current level; a promotion asks whether they are working the way the next level is described. That's why three consecutive top ratings can still come with no promotion — excellent work at the current level is not work at the next one.

The place to prepare is an individual development plan. Pick one sentence from the next level that the person can't do yet, and set up work in the coming quarter that requires practicing it. Without that document, preparing in the month the window opens leaves nothing to point at.

Under about twenty people, most companies have no level table. Promotion there happens as a change of role rather than grade: taking over a team, or owning an area end to end. The founder decides, with no window and no procedure, and it stops holding somewhere past thirty people. With no document to answer questions about the bar, the answer comes out different every time, and two engineers who joined the same month hear two different accounts of what the next step requires.

"I'm putting Theo up for level 4 this window. I've written up the last two quarters."

The candidate is going into review with the evidence document already assembled.

"The work is good, but there's no example yet that matches the level 4 sentences."

Performing well and doing the next level's work are different claims.

"It's not a promotion, it's an internal move, so the level stays."

The seat changes while the grade and salary range don't.

Pagedeck moved to a promotion window every half year once it reached forty-five people. Five candidates went into the first one and two came off the list during review, because what had been written up was strong work at the current level rather than examples matching the sentences for the next one.

What Grace did next was write down for every manager why those two were held, rather than consoling them. Mia copied those lines into her team members' development plans, turning them into work to get done before the next window. Both passed the second time.

The most common reading is that promotion is another phrase for a raise. Pay does go up with one, so the association forms easily. The order is backwards, though. The scope of responsibility changes first, and the number moves afterward to sit inside that level's salary range. Left as is, the company keeps handling requests by raising pay while leaving the level alone, and the person never gets an explanation of what actually changed.

The other common view is that promotion means turning a strong practitioner into a manager. When the picture of moving up is a single line, that was the only mechanism available. With two tracks, the expertise route carries the same levels and the same salary ranges. Left as is, a company keeps trading its best practitioner for an unprepared manager, while the person who actually wanted to lead people waits for a seat that is already filled.