Promotions in tech companies aren’t random, but they’re not entirely deterministic either. Here’s my humble attempt on a generic ‘mathematical’ formula I think makes sense.

Disclaimer: In no way this blog post represents the official position of the companies I worked for in the past or now. While I will try to make this generic, I’m definitely biased by my past experiences, plus my visibility is definitely not that of a VP level, so take this with as big of a grain of salt as you can imagine.

Background

In my career I had 5 promotions, 3 before FAANG and 2 at FAANG. I helped some of the  engineers on my past teams get promoted, mentored a few people outside my org/team, and participated in the promo committee.

I’m definitely not in the high percentile in terms of how far I got with my promotions. There are people who are many levels higher, got there quicker, and didn’t write a word about it. Some think chasing titles is pointless or even toxic. Others say real engineers should just build what they believe in or launch their own startups. I’m writing because it is my thing. I had my path, and you and others have different paths, this is just how life works. So with that healthy dose of self-awareness and some humility, let’s develop a formula for success:

What is the ‘formula’ for promotion?

Unless you’re in a chaotic startup or very small company, promotions usually follow a structured process. The criteria often include your performance, leadership skills, and feedback from others. If I were to boil it down into a formula, it would look like this:

Where:

• Promotion:  Readiness score where < 1.0 means not ready, > 1.0 means ready.
• Execution:  Quantifies direct work (impact, quality, next-level scope); 1.0 = fully executing at next level, 0.8 = close.
• Leadership: Measures ownership, influence, and decision-making, partly quantifiable.
• Feedback: Continuous feedback and visibility through reviews, leadership exposure, and collaboration; hard to quantify but significant.
• Luck: Multiplier (0.5–1.5) that can amplify or dampen other factors; includes final promo packet outcome as a last-moment swing factor.
• Weights: Company and level-specific emphasis on factors (sum to 1); e.g., Meta/Amazon may set we≈0.5, a small company may set wf≈0.7.

Now, lets go over each of these with more details and my thoughts on how you can increase each one of them:

Execution

Most of the time this is the most significant part to promotion, especially at entry and mid levels. It’s the quantification of impact, quality of work, delivering results. Here are some very specific things you can do:

• Basics: Do your job and do it well.
• Quantification: Measure the impact of your work before, during, and after delivery. Even maintenance work can be framed in terms of what would happen if it weren’t done.
• Projects: Focus on high-impact, high-ROI projects. If your project doesn’t seem impactful, either (1) quantify ROI properly, (2) find ways to increase the scope/impact, or (3) if it’s truly low-value, align with stakeholders to drop it and move on.
• Quality: Show engineering or operational excellence, not just speed. This is because cutting corners may get quick wins, but over time they hurt your credibility.
• Scope: read the description of the next level and create mini-gap analysis if the scope of what you are working on is going to fill-in those gaps.

There are many other things to consider here, so see what you still need to do to tick all the marks of the next level of execution. That having said, strong execution gets you good hard data, but without leadership and visibility, it may not get you promoted.

Leadership

If you just joined the company as a fresh grad, not much leadership is expected of you, your Wl coefficient in the formula above will be really small (~0.1) and the higher you go the larger this coefficient is going to be. Companies have their approaches to how to measure this, for instance Amazon has 14 leadership principles, Meta has “Direction” and “People” axis, Google and other companies have their own things.

I will say something controversial, and hard to accept, but IMO a lot of your leadership potential is already backed in your personality at adulthood. I am not saying it is not possible to grow as a leader and improve, what I’m saying is that for some people it comes more naturally because they are more extroverted, confident, and more charismatic. To be clear: if you actively work on improving your leadership skills you will get much further than someone who has better prerequisites but isn’t trying to improve.

Usually, if you are going for promo, you would need to tick some boxes, depending on the framing you company is using.

• Influence. Have examples of influencing others. While influencing with authority is easy, for promotion you would need to show how you influenced peers or your leadership by presenting solid data, writing crisp documents, showing prototypes, telling convincing stories. If you have examples of where you influenced the roadmap at your skip level that would stand out. Trying to influence overly hard can backfire as people could perceive this as you being pushy, so come to them with clarity and data.
• Communication. Communicate clearly, timely, upwards. While this makes sense it is often a lot harder that it sounds. I’ve seen many solid technical engineers that really really struggle with communication. Sometimes the reason could just be English as a second language, but more often than not it is all the cluttering, odd structuring, that has nothing to do with the language proficiency.
• Strategic thinking: Strategize about your area of work, even if you are more junior show that you have given thought to how things should pan out in long term and if you are senior the expectation would be to create scope and solve ambiguous problems, or even find problems where others don’t even see them (yet).
• Trust: Build that trust because it takes time. Higher level leaders often operate on trust they have in their senior engineers. 
• Dealing with ambiguity. The more straightforward the task is the less easier it is to automate and the more unvalued it is. At the age of AI, more and more of clearly defined tasks are going to be automated, so you bring value by being human and being able to deal with all of the missing pieces, unclarity and other things of that sort.
• Leadership gaps: Identify any company specific leadership requirements they might have, these can include: conflict resolutions, raising the bar, mentoring, etc.

At the end of the day someone will have to provide feedback about your work.

Feedback / Visibility

By feedback in my formula I didn’t just mean final feedback you get on your promo package but more of continuous things that includes manager/peer reviews, visibility with leadership, work with other people, this is hardly quantifiable in numbers but does play a significant role in the promotion as this builds that perception around you.

• Manager: Work with your manager to have a complete alignment on expectations and check-in regularly on your own initiative. 
• Peers, cross-org, and your reportees: Just don’t be a jerk to others, express gratitude, be helpful. Doesn’t sound like much, but these things are appreciated.
• Higher leadership. Create a name for the project association in the minds of your leadership. When promo time comes you are not a simple spreadsheet line to them.
• Deliver visible wins: demo your work, share launch emails, and post in relevant channels so more people see the impact.
• Credit: Credit the team in public updates, but make your own role clear in 1:1s with decision-makers. Never take someone’s credit but be clear if you did contribute so that your credit is not misassigned.

Now, you might have all the great execution, leadership and visibility, there is one last piece that might override it all and it is the effect of luck.

Luck

One purely deterministic and cold-blooded view is that you are worth exactly what you are worth, meaning that if you somehow think you deserve a higher level this is simply wrong as you were not able to determine what it takes to get that what you want and therefore you don’t deserve it. Big companies have a data-driven approach to promotions, so if you have the data for the next level you would undeniably get it.

I do not buy this idealistic view and that’s why I introduced the Luck multiplier to my formula. It is a multiplier rather than an additive term, because it can significantly boost or dampen the effect of your other factors – you can execute and lead perfectly but still be blocked by bad timing, or get promoted earlier due to being in a high-visibility project at the right moment and because your org has big promo budget that time. You might have worked on a project that suddenly started making millions/billions of dollars growing and riding everyone’s careers with it or you might have worked on a failed project and got laid off. 

So if there is so much you cannot control, do you just give up? Well, maybe, work on slightly improving your chances:

• Preparation. Deliberately invest learning and self-growth. While it might not give you that immediate promo, it can position you well in the future.
• Openness to opportunities. Do not ignore opportunities when you see them, evaluate them and act on them. It has some risk, yes, but as one of my first mentors once said “Never moving fish is a dead fish”.

Weights

Weights used in my formula are reflecting your company’s emphasis on each factor for a given level (they sum to 1 for normalization), for example companies like Meta or Amazon can make huge emphasis on Execution, making that We close to 0.5, while your small company really trusts what the others say about you so Wf is 0.7. At a very senior level your Wl becomes a much larger contributor.

Once you know your scores and weights, here’s how to move them.

Strategy and Tactical Plan

Here is the advice I give people when they ask me about promotion and it consists of two big steps:

1. Career Strategy: Write down a strategy for your career. A long term one. One that describes what the hell you want to achieve in your career in 1, 2, 5 years. You don’t have to share it with anyone, but it will help you build clarity for yourself. Go, do it right now, create a Google doc, write some raw disconnected sentences, and expand to make it more crisp over time. I happen to be at Meta because it was part of my Career Strategy.
2. Tactical Plan: Find a promo document template and start filling it in, even if your promotion is 1 year away.
   1. Start with a target date for your promotion, work out what makes sense, align that with your manager. If you are not getting definite ‘yes’ from the manager it is the feedback you are too aggressive and you might not see something.
   2. Identify any missing gaps, what’s needed to get you from A to B, start on your own based on your company’s framework and template, involve your manager, and gather feedback.
   3. Identify any blind spots, as usually there will be things you don’t know about, your manager might not be directly telling you. A mentor can help you get that outsider perspective.

Conclusion

Luck is outside your control, but readiness isn’t. Don’t judge others purely by their title, success of their project or generally where they are in their life, everyone fights their own demons and battles, you just don’t know. The best shot you have at a promotion is to consistently operate at the next level in execution, leadership, and visibility. In this post I’ve shared my formula:

Promo = (Execution + Leadership + Feedback) * Luck

If you work deliberately on each part, you shift the odds in your favor. Hopefully, what I’ve shared here gives you a clearer map for getting to your next level.

Are you tired of all of the online advice? All of these LinkedIn and other social media stories and posts where there are only 10 steps formulas for the ultimate success and happiness. I’m certainly tired. I’m not saying it’s all bad advice out there, it’s just overwhelming, repetitive, often one-sided, half-baked, naive, and unactionable. It’s the most frustrating to see advice that is not original, copied from somewhere, and just posted to grab your attention. Arguably, some people might benefit from specific posts (hopefully you can benefit from this one), but this constant fight for your attention makes it difficult to sift through the influx of information and do anything about it.

I came to the conclusion that at a certain point saturation with this online advice is such that spending more time on it has diminishing returns. At that point it is much better to put YOUR own thinking into it and create your own self-advise. You already know what is missing in your career or life, you already know your shortcomings and desires. You might not be able to spell it out right away, that’s why instead of scrolling through hundreds of stories that may or may not be applicable to you, you would benefit much more if you spend that time on thinking for yourself and trying to understand what is going to work for you, realistically and with all the context of your situation.

For example, for your career, you might want to create a strategy document (yes, an actual document with structure and everything). I rarely see people taking active career planning other than “I want to get promoted”, but there is so much more that goes into it. When I wrote my career strategy document I assessed my current situation and created a vision for the future by asking lots of simple questions and doing pros/cons of  “Do I want to continue to be remote?”, “Do I want to convert to a manager?”, “How about another industry?”, “What are the new skills I want to learn?”, “Am I stimulated and challenged enough in my current environment?”, etc. (LLMs can generate a good starting list of questions).

The end of the year is a good time for self-reflection and strategizing about your own life and career. I think that everyone has to have their own approach based on what has and hasn’t worked for them. Over the years I came up with an approach that mostly works for me. Specifically, I create new year resolutions (since 2010) and then track them (mostly publicly). In order to be accountable and consistent I run weekly challenges and email exchanges with friends who would agree.

Instead of relying on the overwhelming and often repetitive flood of online advice (including this one), take this post as an encouragement to create your own personalized strategy for life and career growth by taking time at the end of this year to self-reflect, think deeply about your current situation, and then come up with approach that truly works for you, not a formula borrowed from someone else online.

Disclaimer: opinions in this post are my own and do not represent opinions of my current employer or any of my past employers or any of my or their clients.

Señor Engineer
I just had to put this picture for few friends of mine ;)

Recently I got promoted to Senior Software Engineer position at Amazon. This post starts with my career story leading to the place where I am now and finishing with thoughts on titles, their meaning, and further thoughts on professional growth for software engineers. Bear with me, this is a long post with no conclusion.

Career Path so Far

My first job was with a Ukrainian outsourcing company, Softserve Inc. I started there in April 2008 and left the company in December 2011 to pursue new experiences in Western Europe. During those 3.5 years I got promoted twice. When exiting the company I was titled “Senior Software Developer” leading a team of 8 developers. Most of us were young software engineers just some years out of college, we were in a different kind of business than all of my next jobs (outsourcing vs. product).

My first job is still an inspiration on how I should be approaching my career. Being career driven, ambitious, and overly eager to learn non-stop were the main characteristics of me back then. I was brave enough to speak at user group events, and teach others. I’ve just read old post on leaving my first job and it inspires me. My English is horrible, but the meaning is everything:

I joined my second company in Austria as a Software Engineer (intermediate level) and was extremely happy with the quality of software we were producing and everyone’s skills. This was the first time I started learning about distributed systems and just loved working there. I hammered the keyboard non-stop and was happy. As it always is, every story has its end. I left my second company banally to earn more money. Sad but true. They tried to keep me by offering some XX% salary increase, and… drumbeat… a “Senior Software Engineer” title. I rejected. I don’t know if that was the right move, but that clearly was time when I chose money over title or even over happiness at work. Below is a blog post about leaving second job and reasons why I chose money, if you are interested:

I spent only 1.5 years with second company after which I had long 4.5 years with United Nations (well, the IAEA, which is international organization associated to UN). I started as a contractor Software Engineer – my title didn’t really matter as at first I was self-employed, I could probably have called myself “God Of Software Engineering” at “Greatest Software Company In The World” and it would not matter as for the IAEA I was just a contractor and they made me go through airport-like security each and every day for few years. In the end they hired me as a Staff Member with a cryptic title “Systems Analyst / Programmer” putting me in charge of a team of contractors :). This was another bump in my income as suddenly I didn’t have to pay taxes (yes, let me repeat it – I legally did not have to pay any taxes at all).

The place is definitely unlike any other workplace. There were over 100 different nationals working in the same building with me. I worked directly with people from Iraq, Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan, UK, Australia, Canada, China, India, and so many other countries it was virtually impossible to know who is from where. There was so much learning about different cultures. This alone was awesome. There were tons of other benefits related to working at that place. Not everything was great. For instance, I had to come to work in a suite – yes, software engineer in a suite. More seriously I was looking for more growth. Even if I managed to get promoted that would not make any major difference. Maybe, I would just start wearing a tie in addition to suite. Unfortunately, I don’t have a blog post about leaving that place, even though I have so much to share. All I have is this picture of me getting out of a nuclear reactor and tweet:

Up until 2018 I was mostly .NET engineer with desktop, distributed, mobile and web skills. Starting to work for Amazon meant dropping good portion of that knowledge and learning Java and many things from the “dark side” (oh, sorry, that’s the other way around). I’ve joined Amazon as SDE2 and I didn’t mind joining on an intermediate title as I knew that working for one of FAANG sets me on a totally different growth path that brings challenges of a different magnitude. I cannot talk too much about work at Amazon other than what’s public. But it is not a secret that one line of code change could mean MM$ of loss or MM$ of revenue here just because of enormous scale. This is why Amazon always tries to raise the engineering bar. Amazon is a place of insane growth. Love it.

Do titles matter?

So where am I going with all of this? If you followed me so far, you would notice I always skipped titles either for new experience, more money, or growth opportunities.

So do titles matter? I think it depends on how you look at them. You can be “CTO” at company of 10 people making 100K a year, or be a fresh grad Junior Engineer at top company in bay area and make twice as much. But “CTO” might have a chance to grow her company to giant and make millions because she is in a different growth position. It is not only about titles but what they really mean, what level of responsibility they bring, what is the pay band, what impact, knowledge, and skills are expected. Most often companies define levels boiling down to some kind of seniority and scope of responsibilities and then would define different titles having technical track, management track and maybe few more.

Long story short, I think titles do matter but they matter in a context.

When I look at titles of people whom I knew from my first job I get humbled – some of them got promoted 6 times to the likes of “Vice President of Something” or “Senior Solutions Architect” or even something more pompous. Not all of them, though, some of them who were less ambitious or had different goals took different paths. This makes me wondering where I would have ended up had I stayed. I will never know, but should I even care? Should you care about your past decisions and think too much? We should not! Regret is a painful emotional state to avoid. We need to always try to minimize potential regret.

So how to get to the next level?

Everyone of us has a different path in life and in our careers and that is just the way it is. We care about ourselves, our families and people we know and relate to. So for the most part you don’t care about me or my title the same way as I don’t care about your title or other engineers’ titles. That having said, you might be interested in this post as you might be wondering how you can get to your next level or what you can learn. Human nature is not to be happy with what they have and I am ok with this. This is normal.

Here are original bullet points from me:

• Do your job and do it well. Really well. Master the tools. Balance delivery and long-term perspective.
• Never ever stop learning. Improve yourself in all areas. Soft and hard skills.
• Work on projects that have impact and could grow to something big. If you don’t think you are on such a project change the project or change the project.
• Find a mentor and work with your manager and others to get you where you want to be.
• Look at what next level implies and do those things. Take responsibilities. Now.
• Make your work visible and document what you’ve done.
• Stay healthy. Sleep well.

How much in a promotion is luck?

This is a difficult question. If I take philosophical approach I would say that a lot is due to luck – we just pop up like little candles in different parts of the world and then we fade away, you might have been unlucky to be born in poorest country in the world or your parents might have started preparing you for Stanford in elementary school. You might have worked on a project that suddenly started making millions of dollars growing and riding everyone’s careers with it or you might have worked on failed project and got laid off.

Another cold-blooded view is absolutely deterministic. You are worth exactly what you are worth, meaning that if you somehow think you deserve higher level this is simply wrong as you were not able to determine what it takes to get that what you want and therefore you don’t deserve it. Big companies have data-driven approach to promotions. If you have the data for the next level you will undeniably get it.

My overnight promotion was years in making.

Conclusion?

This was just a story. You can make your own conclusions. I’m just encouraging you not to give up. Feel free to leave me a congratulatory or any other kind of comment.

Among other things, this promotion completes one of the important parts of my 2020 new year resolution. I’m now 12.5% done and more is to come.