Issue #26

Speedrun Your Tech Promotion

During Q1 of 2020, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Amazon. I received hundreds of congratulations via email and Slack when the announcement was made, and hundreds more when I changed my job title on LinkedIn. The lockdown had just started, so I suspect many more people were glued to social media than usual. As I sat in my makeshift home office receiving these messages, I thought to myself that I should feel happier. Was this it? What the people sending those messages didn't see was that I had been put up for promotion and failed five times over the previous four years. My success did not feel as good as those five previous attempts felt bad. Not by a long shot.

Getting to Senior SDE was the exact opposite experience, I felt like I was on a rocket ship. I started at Amazon as a support engineer in 2006 and made a lateral move to L4 SDE-I in December of 2007. I got to SDE-II in Q1 of 2009 and made it to Senior SDE, SDE-III, in Q1 of 2012. I was flying through the ranks, and by 2016, I thought I had what it took to become a Principal Engineer. But it wasn't meant to be. I had gotten pretty far by winging it, but once I got stuck, I didn't know what to do to unstick myself.

This was a tough pill to swallow because, like many software engineers, concepts usually come easily to me. Picking up a new programming language or framework is just a matter of putting in some time and taking some reps. There are resources available for seemingly anything you want to learn. When I first started programming, those resources came in the form of physical books. When the internet became ubiquitous, it came in the form of websites like Stack Overflow and YouTube. Then came the overwhelming amount of resources to crack the technical interview, which was really difficult to prepare for just 10 years ago. Now, this learning is nearly commoditized. However, there are no direct resources for the promotion problem that I encountered. Until now.

How exactly do you get promoted to the highest levels in tech in the shortest amount of time? There's a simple recipe. You must meet or exceed expectations for your current level and clearly demonstrate skills required for the next level. The simple recipe has complicated steps. So to be systematic and thorough, we simply recurse. How do you meet or exceed expectations for your current level? How do you clearly demonstrate next-level skills? There are simple recipes to those questions as well. At some point you get to straightforward and easy steps that take all of the guesswork out of it.

I’m launching a program called Speedrun to Promotion in the near future to help guide people through this process. It's the resource I wish had existed for me ten years ago. The program is meant for people already in the industry who are looking to make a lateral move, such as from support engineer to SDE, like I did, or who are interested in climbing the tech ladder as quickly and efficiently as possible in their current role. The speedrun analogy really resonates with me. Instead of using a cheat code to get to the next level, which may leave you unprepared for what comes next, the idea is to pick up and exercise only the skills crucial to progression. The idea is to be efficient, but not to skip things that are critical.

So, if you're interested, please click on this link to join the mailing list for more information. There, I'll be sharing a ton of tips, tricks, and advice specifically on promotion, including a technique that I’ve developed called Tech Promotion Algorithm. I’ve used this algorithm with everybody that I’ve helped get to the next level with amazing results, including several people to the principal level. To launch the program I’ll be hosting a webinar to deep dive on the Tech Promotion Algorithm and provide information about the program itself.

This email list will continue to operate as usual, as will my YouTube channel, so don't think that I'm pivoting to something completely different.

Looking back on my journey, I had all the ingredients to be promoted back in 2016 and I was just as technically skilled as I was in 2020. I just had some preconceived ideas about what was required, and I ended up putting a lot of effort into things that ultimately didn't make a difference. It was a frustrating four years of my life, and it took away from me really savoring my accomplishment when it finally came. My goal is that nobody in the same position ever has to go through that.

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