Number 13 - Lukewarm promotions

Wait; is getting promoted a bad thing now?

Since we are born, we are constantly being taught that progress is natural. Society expects everyone from countries and corporations to the average person to constantly grow. The growth itself can be linear or exponential but lack of growth is seen as a type of failure.

Translating the imperative of constant growth to the workplace means that workers expect to be promoted. This of course applies also in R&D and adjacent fields. The problem is that promotion is often linked to a transition to management.

But not everybody wants to or should be a manager. Some engineers' dream is just to develop solutions. I often hear senior or lower management colleagues complain that they only get to do so little of what they love after their promotion. Instead they feel they are bogged down by bureaucracy, trivial meetings and technical reviews. Given that their alternative was to face career stagnation, something that our society has taught us to consider as failure, they were somehow shoehorned to the role of a manager.

This can be even more outrageous when its not even linked to a salary bump. I 've seen motivated and successful engineers being "rewarded" with being project leads of the small team they already belonged to, with no official role change. Effectively the employee was punished for their successes for more work!

Given the importance of motivation for success, especially in a research environment, I think the damage of forced promotions to leadership should be avoided like the plague. Organizations should always offer double advancement tracks for technical and non-technical roles (like what Big Tech does) and always tune in promotions to the career trajectory of the specific worker. Let's give people what they deserve and get a hand at actually changing the world!

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