The hidden and misunderstood work
You may have had a colleague in the past that got promoted even though you may have thought that they were not deserving it. While your assessment may be true, it may also not be.
If you want to grow (to get promoted but also from a personal point of view), you should try to understand why they were promoted rather than feeling bitter about it:
- You may not be aware of the work they actually did. The most obvious illustration is how we don’t use the number of pull requests merged to decide who is the most productive or impactful engineer – some work require a lot of debugging, some require a lot of product/legal discussion etc. Fun fact is that I made a one line change at Google that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of additional revenue – the change was however the result of months of complex discussions with product counsels that no one in engineering knew about.
- You may not understand the value of their work. This is surprisingly (and sadly) fairly common. For example, a lot of junior engineers don’t understand the value of their senior peers’ work – they probably see them spending time in meetings, writing design documents and building trackers but can’t grasp the value of their work or how difficult it is. This is true across ladders too – e.g. engineers struggling to understand the value of managers, of other non technical positions
With all that being said, I’m sure there are cases of people not deserving their promotion but you should take every opportunity you have to grow – learning from your successful peers is a very efficient way to grow. The reason I had a solid growth trajectory at Google is because I was surrounded by high caliber engineers that I learned from. This is also one of the reasons I joined Databricks – many solid engineers I enjoyed working with are at Databricks today (side note, if you are interested in joining, we have quite a few open positions, checkout our website!)
What examples have you seen of people failing to grasp the difficulty of someone’s work? Head to the comments for more discussions!