No promo? NGMI

Step 1: You need to be promoted quickly

Welcome, Avatar!

Step 1 in BowTied Bull's Efficiency formula is success in your sales, finance, or tech career.

Sales (BowTied SalesGuy), finance (BowTied Bull), and even how to get into tech (BowTied Fox) have good coverage in the Jungle.

But, getting in to tech is just the beginning.

Congrats on the new logo on your resume. I hope you got lots of comments with your LinkedIn humble brag flex post.

But you need to know this, reaching Step 1 in tech requires a lot more than getting in the door and writing code that compiles.

To achieve Step 1, you need to be promoted, quickly.

If you're not getting promoted, sorry anon but you're NGMI.

Promotions Are Not a Reward

Many engineers fit the archetypes. Some are nerdy, others social, some are sportsball fanatics. But at the end of the day, most still assume the following is true:

If I do good work, my manager will reward me.

Notice the confidence of the word "will". It is formulaic. Cause and effect. Most people won't have the self-awareness to immediately notice that this is their mental model too.

But you anon, might be different.

If you have the wrong mental model on career growth in tech, you'll grind and work hard yet get frustrated at your lack of progress.

Let this sink in: promotions are not a reward for your work. At least not in such a direct, formulaic way. Good work alone is not enough.

Your manager is not your Dad. Your company is not your family. A promotion isn't the "job well done", "Good job, son" that you unconsciously are craving.

Jeff Bezos isn't at a desk reviewing a binder of Amazon SDEs with a smile on his face, doling out pay bumps and new levels because he's proud of their work.

Jeff Bezos is there to build a profitable business, profit which is surplus value from each product sold and each engineer employed. You are an input, your software and its business impact is the output.

Your boss will pay you as close to the minimum to keep you from leaving and retain your increasing output. Thanks for playing.

Getting promoted is a secret game, but nobody tells you the rules, or which team the players are on.

You can't win a game you don't know you're playing. And you need to win to achieve Step 1.

Beyond The Party Line

Tech has almost uniquely among industries been able to become the identity for many employees. "Bring your whole self to work", "our team is a family", "we're changing the world", "we care about you".

All this HR speak, faux inclusivity, and baiting you to live at work without boundaries has an obvious conflict of interest.

There are material benefits to the companies that have convinced their employees that the company will do right by them if they release all inhibitions and code hard to change the world. I remember reading that the profit per engineer at Google was on average $1.7m/year. Now, multiply that by 250k employees, or however many they now have after layoffs. You can do the math. Or just go check their latest earnings. Google has for decades been printing money like it's the Fed.

"The company man" is a fun boomer meme when thinking of IBM employees singing their own IBM hymns in IBM suits. Those stupid boomers and their loyalty.

But, swap out the suits for rainbow colored spinner hats, a la Google, and the end result of fanatically devoted employees looks pretty similar. Google and other big tech companies have "lifers" just like IBM did, and likewise will fire without a tear shed when their earnings or your performance drops.

If your approach to succeeding at work isn’t working, then you will be well served to meditate on the next few posts.

You, anon, would be better served with a less idealistic, more pragmatic view of your employment, your job, and your employer. My career certainly hasn't looked the same since I took off the blinders and took out the IV drip of company kool-aid.

Who is BowTied Fullstack?

I'm a staff fullstack engineer at a big tech company. I regularly work across backend, web, dev-ops and occasionally dabble with mobile.

I went from lagging my peers who I kept seeing getting promoted while my manager said I "wasn't ready" and nearly getting fired for insubordination, to being promoted past peers and being one of the youngest at the staff level.

Step 1 is locked in for me. After many promotions and improved work efficiency, I've been able to take my foot of the gas, funnel my cash flows into investments, and, during work hours, pour my time into Step 2: building up a side business that I own. I'm not close to Bull level, but progress is progress.

Not everyone can do this, anon. But if I could, then it's not impossible for you.

Equal opportunities, unequal results.

I had little going for me. I didn't have the grades to get into the CS major at my local school. I started in an arts degree and got overrides into math courses, and over time transferred through 3 programs before finally getting into CS in my junior year.

I'm no genius or natural-born 10x engineer. (Yes, they do exist).

My internships were at near failing and always flailing startups, I couldn't even get an interview at a big tech company. A recruiter at a 100-person startup who I had hit it off with years before, switched jobs in my senior year to a big tech company, and asked if I wanted to interview. She didn't think I'd be a slam dunk but was willing to see how it went.

I hadn't studied. I had just bombed my Microsoft interviews a month earlier. Somehow I got the job. Years and promotions later, I’ve learned a lot.

Why write?

I enjoy writing. Always have. But writing anonymously in the Jungle now feels for the first time like I can write freely.

I like sharing what I’ve learned to help others succeed. It’s been a rewarding to help colleagues get promotions or understand why they aren’t thriving.

Most tech people focus on hard skills (Leet code…). We’ll cover a bit of that.

But mostly, folks are mentally lazy (myself included) and don’t want to do the harder work of sorting out their soft skills (managing upwards, promo packets, office politics…) and ultimately their life skills.

I’m focused and will be writing on the full stack: hard skills, soft skills, life skills.

If you're looking to fast track your progress to Step 1, then you'll probably want to subscribe.

A coffee a month for proven tactics and strategies to land your next promo faster… that sounds like its worth the price of admission.

My colleagues smiling at their bigger paychecks after following my advice and getting early promotions certainly seem to think so.

Remember, there's a lot more we need to cover if you're going to make it.

Stay toon'd.

- BowTied Fullstack