Go Straight To The Source For Promotions – Dev Leader Weekly 56

TL; DR:

• Today’s article is a bit shorter — I am on vacation!
• Tactically, your manager is the best source for career progression
• Other perspectives are great for understanding general meta points
• No Monday night livestream! — Because of vacation!

What’s In This Issue

Exclusive Article: Go Straight To The Source For Promotions

Does This Sound Familiar?

You’re a junior software engineer trying to work towards that next promotion. Hell, you might even be a senior software engineer trying to do the same thing.

That next level is right there but it also feels elusive. You’re close to it, right? Surely next time you’ll get it?

But you’re second-guessing yourself. You haven’t technically heard anything from your manager about it. But you DID see those posts on LinkedIn about what to do. Those other senior engineers have published tons of content about how to do it.

And wait! You know senior engineers at work that have done it too! You can ask them exactly what to do to get to the next level — that’ll fix this.

But here’s why I’m willing to bet every single one of those people is going to be the wrong source to go to in this situation. In fact, I’m also included in that list — I am NOT the right person to go to in that situation. However, there may be some truly great meta points for you to extract from others in terms of overall career framing that’s valuable to hear from them.

So, how is it those people can be “wrong” but also right? Let’s see.

Real Scenarios (With Fake People)

To build on the points prior, I want to walk you through two scenarios that are based on real things — but I’m of course not going to write about real people nor the exact real events for anonymity.

I have been doing early-in-career mentorship for a few years now at Microsoft. This is an opportunity that I love, and one of the things that happens is that I get to have one on ones with early-in-career junior engineers. They often open up to me about challenges they’re having, and one of the most common — unquestionably this comes up every cohort — is how to navigate promotions.

• “Nick, what should I be doing to get promoted?”
• “Nick, I can’t tell if I’m working on the right priority things.”
• “Nick, promotions are coming up and I am not sure if I need more projects to get promoted.”

I get these questions all the time — and I don’t blame the engineers for asking me. I can give plenty of general guidance and meta-points around these circumstances, but I’m not the right person to answer. I’ll let you guess who is, and I’ll make sure to answer it at the end of this section. See if you’re right!

The next example I get generally comes from engineers with more seniority or more experience. They’re a bit more resourceful when trying to answer these exact same question. Sometimes conversations look like this:

• “Nick, will I get promoted if I complete X project?”
• “Nick, person X told me if I want to get promoted I need another project like Y to get promoted. What do you think?”
• “I saw online that the best way to get promoted is to make your manager’s life easier”

Again, I am not the right person to answer this stuff. But did you make your guess yet at who is?

Their own direct manager.

Go To The Source

People seem very adverse to having conversations with their manager about career progression and promotions, but when it comes to being tactical, there is no better person to have a conversation with. Your direct manager is going to be the person that puts you up for promotion. Why wouldn’t you talk to them about it directly?

And look — I realize this is easier said than done. Not many people feel like they have a manager they can talk to about this sort of thing. Unfortunately, a strategy built around hoping your manager will just put opportunities onto your lap is not a great strategy at all. You’ll likely find yourself disappointed more often than you’d like with promotion conversations.

Not every manager seems approachable. Not every manager seems like they want to spend time discussing career progression. I feel for the people that have managers like this, but I think it’s important to try. And if you try and you can’t break through, my suggestion is to prioritize finding a manager that IS willing to have these conversations with you. But expect that you’ll still need to drive them.

And yes, these are meta points for you to consider — I can’t suggest you take these actions to better your situation without knowing it at all.

So let’s recall that your manager is the one that will put you up for promotion. I strongly believe that most managers WANT you to succeed and do well, so they WANT to be in a position to promote you. They’re going to need the evidence to make a case for you to get promoted though — and only they will know best about what they’ll need to have the confidence to do that effectively. The more you can build clarity and alignment with them by working through conversations on promotions and career progressions, the better off you’ll be.

Yes. Still meta points from me though. As an engineering manager of 12 years, this is the most tactical advice I can give you on this topic though.

Misconceptions and Misalignment

I mentioned folks posting online about how they’ve successfully been promoted and how that might not necessarily work for you. That’s not to throw shade at them, that’s to tell you that you need to understand general advice given from someone vs advice directly from the source (i.e. your manager in this case). Their advice might be great, but it might not be right in your circumstances.

In this very article, I tried to call out the same thing when I said you should go talk to your manager about this stuff — but I don’t know if your manager is a total asshole and disallows any career discussions. I can’t know this, so even my most tactical advice for you in this still needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Understand WHY I am suggesting you need to go to the source.

I figured I’d demonstrate this with a couple of examples of misconceptions:

• “Make your manager’s life easier”: I think this is interesting advice that aims to try and get you to focus on high visibility problems. I don’t think it was ever meant to be literally go solve happiness for your manager, but essentially if you can solve problems for them they’re likely highly visible and high impact. Generally speaking — I think that’s great.
  
  Without context, this advice is weird. The “problems” that I have to solve at work aren’t ones I need my team members to solve. The problems I need them to solve are generally work that we’ve planned or high-priority unplanned work that has some urgency. The problems I am solving relate to planning, career opportunities for team members, solving interpersonal conflicts, etc… I need my team members to help solve business priorities, not Nick-specific problems.
• “If I finish this project, will I get promoted”: I think this framing comes from the fact that individuals are working for high visibility high impact work their managers can use as evidence they are ready. So… I get it. But generally speaking, your manager is the one that puts you up for promotion and not the one that always has the final say (maybe in many cases they do, but certainly this has not been the case in my entire career).
  
  I do not promise promotions for finishing projects. I don’t like dangling carrots in front of people like this. I also would feel like an absolute monster if someone finished the project and thought they were getting a promotion — but there wasn’t sign-off on it beyond the manager. This happened to me when I was rejected for my first promotion at Microsoft — For TWO managers I delivered on projects where it was advertised “Do this for promotion” and in neither case did I receive one.
  
  If you’re keen you might say “Nick, isn’t that an example of going to the source and it backfired”? You’d be right. But there are two sources in my case — one is my manager, who needs to be able to put me up for promo. The next is understanding what the group who make a decision about my promotion are looking for. So I needed their feedback to understand the missing link.

What To Do Next

How I navigate things with my team will look different than how your manager does it. These are implementation details in my management style, and tour manager will have their own. I use rubrics to show people on my team why certain projects are giving them an opportunity to demonstrate key traits. We also chat through the business impact of that. If that project is delayed (outside of our control) or priorities change, I can at least confidently speak to all of the work they put into it. I also ask them to let me know if they’re feeling unsure about career progress or project alignment so we can have a constructive conversation about it — no ambiguity or guessing.

But that’s what works for me. If you want to know what works in your case, I recommend you go talk to the person who’s going to be responsible for putting you up for promotion.

As for all of the other promo advice that you read out there on the Internet, including this very article:

• Understand the meta points being made
• Sift through things you don’t align with
• Experiment with trying things out to learn how they work (or not) for you

I wish you success in your career progression!

• Join me and other software engineers in the private Discord community!
• All of my weekly vlogs are now on YouTube which are accessible via membership!
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Weekly Recap

Listen Up! – Quartz NET Listeners Explained

Hey! Did you hear that? Listen up!

After this tutorial, you’ll be able to listen more effectively to the jobs and triggers you use when scheduling in Quartz NET. Enhanced observability and hook-up points, for the win!

Quartz NET provided three major types of listeners:

• Jobs
• Triggers
• Schedulers

And each one has different capabilities. Wait until you see what the scheduler listener can do… Holy!

Practice Makes Perfect: Behavioral Interviews – Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

You know what they say…

Practice makes perfect.

We all know there’s no such thing as perfect, but that’s no excuse to ditch the practice.

If you’re about to start:

• Your development journey
• Applying to jobs
• Interviewing
• Your job

Guess what’s going to help you out?

Practice.

This was an AMA live stream where I focused on:

• My newsletter points regarding building software engineering interview skills
• Jumping into articles/posts from LinkedIn & Reddit
• Answering YOUR questions

AVOID THESE! – Follow The Quartz NET Listener Best Practices

Quartz NET has listeners that unlock a TON of observability.

BUT BEWARE!

It’s super easy to completely bork your precious scheduled jobs. And nobody wants that after you put all the effort into leveraging a powerful system like Quartz.

So what can you do?

Check out these best practices for working with Quartz NET listeners to avoid these common problems.

Be The Luck For Other Software Engineers – Interview With Scott Hanselman

Arguably the coolest thing I’ve been able to do in my content creation journey for software engineers to date:

I got to sit down and chat with Scott Hanselman.

I bet that the overwhelming majority of my audience knows Scott. It’s almost impossible to be in this area of tech without knowing him! If you’ve seen a 3d printer online you definitely know Scott.

Scott is the VP of Developer Community at Microsoft — but if you ask him, he’s happy to simply say “I’m a teacher”.

Those of us who know him have all learned a great deal from him. If this is your introduction to Scott, then I’m sure you’ll be hooked on his content.

Thanks for being the luck that so many software engineers need, Scott.

WITHOUT Entity Framework Core?! – Using DbUp For Database Migrations

Everybody uses EF Core for their data access in CSharp.

Well… Almost everybody.

I don’t — but it’s not because I think it’s bad. It’s just a personal preference and sticking to patterns I’m used to. I’ll be on the EF Core train some day!

But today is not that day.

Until then, here’s an awesome tool called DbUp that’s very much aligned with how I like to work with SQL and database migrations. In this video, I’ll walk you through an introduction to using DbUp so you can try it out in your next dotnet project!

As always, thanks so much for your support! I hope you enjoyed this issue, and I’ll see you next week.

​Nick “Dev Leader” Cosentino
​[email protected]​
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Nick Cosentino Principal Software Engineering Manager

Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft. Views are my own.

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