You Won't Be Promoted Unless You Ask
Don’t wait for your manager to bring it up; you should start the conversation. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for a promotion; many people feel shy about it, but you don’t need to. Pitch your case
This edition of the newsletter contains
Btw, enrollments are open for my Systems Design October cohort (sessions start 11th Oct, ~30 seats left). If you’d like to dig deeper into systems, their implementation, and how to design them the way they actually run in production, check out:
The course is completely no-fluff and packed with brainstorming and discussions that will shape your thought process and intuition. You’ll feel like you’re part of a real technical discussion happening at your workplace.
You Won’t Be Promoted Unless You Ask
It is important that your work and impact are recognized and that you are rewarded for your contributions. But how do you make that happen?
Don’t wait for your manager to bring it up; you should start the conversation. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for a promotion; many people feel shy about it, but you don’t need to. Pitch your case for a promotion and see how your manager responds.
Two cases - either your manager says you’re ready, or they will say you are not. If you are ready, that’s great! Work with your manager to formalize the promotion packet and ensure everything is aligned for the upcoming cycle.
If you are not ready, work with your manager to create an actionable plan. This plan might take a few quarters to a few years to complete, and that’s okay. Think of it as a checklist. Once you’ve completed it, pitch again.
Now, if you’ve done everything that was asked and you are still told “not yet,” the possible paths you have are
wait, it could be a genuine case where roles aren’t open
have a firm conversation up the ladder and pitch again
look for growth opportunities in adjacent teams
begin looking for new roles elsewhere, and make a responsible transition when the time is right.
There is no absolute right or wrong here. The only wrong move is reacting with harsh or emotional language to express disappointment. Stay professional, always.
Chasing promotions is important, but it shouldn’t consume all your energy. Even if it does, that’s okay, because you own your career. Just make sure you are also growing, doing work you are proud of, and finding peace in what you do.
By the way,
Being hands-on is the best way for you to learn. Practice interesting programming challenges like building your own BitTorrent client, Redis, DNS server, and even SQLite from scratch on CodeCrafters.
Sign up, and become a better engineer.
Here’s a video from me
I published a video - Everything you need to know about REST
Is REST all about just exposing an HTTP endpoint? Nope. not at all.
REST is how browsers talk to our servers. 99.99% of all your API requests that originate from your browser and go to your API servers are REST. So, what is REST?
Let’s talk about REST today,
understand the foundations of it,
see how and why it gels so well with HTTP,
find out why everyone is using it, and
conclude by going through the downsides of using REST over HTTP.
Here’s a paper I recently read
I spent some time reading Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing
Google (in 2010) processed graphs with 120 billion+ edges without drowning in distributed systems complexity, and that’s mind-blowing.
Some time back, I read a paper by Google titled Pregel, which is a large-scale graph processing system. The paper covers the challenges, the design, the trade-offs, and, more importantly, the intuition behind the design.
One thing that I found really interesting was how the system makes nodes talk to each other via message passing. This simplifies scaling out a cluster, performing distributed computation, and models many graph algorithms with fault tolerance.
They ran a billion-vertex graph with 127B edges on 800 workers. No fancy network hardware, just well-designed coordination between nodes. If you are into distributed computation and systems or just like exciting engineering nuances, you will have a blast reading this paper.
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
Three interesting articles I read
I read a few engineering blogs almost every day, and here are the three articles I read and would recommend you read.
Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses
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It's such a sensible strategy for obtaining promotions!
Rather than trying to guess, get a checklist from the manager and work on it!