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There’s a phrase that gets tossed around in promotion conversations that makes engineering managers somewhat uncomfortable: “You need to demonstrate you can operate at the next level first”.
It sounds reasonable. Promotions shouldn’t be speculative. You want evidence someone can handle increased scope before you formalise it. Fair enough.
But in practice your engineer spends a year doing next-level work, assumes they’re on track, and then discovers - often in a performance review - that they were missing something you never told them about. A specific type of project. A visibility requirement. Something that seemed obvious to y…