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Avoiding Promotions Could Radically Save Your Life
Promotions mean meetings, meetings decrease efficiency, and when you reach zero efficiency something wonderful may happen.
Promotion is a thing that we, as progressive software engineers, do not actively seek out. This is, as it’s widely known, in the hallowed halls where we discuss strategy of the grand game that ‘promotion’ as such is very often a double-edged sword — or perhaps something that may initially seem like a thoughtful gift but in fact turns out to be a debilitating millstone hanging forever around your already painful neck¹.
As you may recall we’re primarily in the grand game for the love of the subject, but we also have to make a living and so therefore devote an awful lot of unnecessary time and resources to getting paid a decent market rate wage for our knowledge and experience.
The upside to devoting all of this time to getting paid properly is that it often forces us to change jobs to more progressive employers who, at least for a while, do pay us properly This is a ‘win-win’ as your project manager would say (without understanding what it means) as it also allows us to work on fun and interesting projects and not those in banking, SaaS, or blockchain nonsense no matter how lucrative and interesting a recruiter may make them sound on the phone.
