Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.

Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.

So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).

See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.

Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease.

Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.

> Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.

While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...

The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.

I find it super sad that we should teach kids how to climb corporate ladders rather than taking control of their life, starting businesses, making the world a better place or chasing a career of fulfilment rather than maximizing money return.

Agreed. Every kid their senior year of high school should be forming an LLC, starting a company around their idea, learning the basic skills to operate one, if they want to graduate.

I sometimes can't even detect sarcasm on HN anymore. What 16-18 year old kid (or their parents) has the capital and time to start and run their own business? Even when they're adults, they likely will not have access to business ownership. Depending on the source you use, somewhere between 5 and 10% of Americans own their own business. I'm not saying basic business skills aren't valuable--they are, but the vast, vast majority of people will work for someone else throughout their careers. Shouldn't we be optimizing education for the 90% case?

You and I have a fundamentally different view about how to optimize education. Your view is probably great to cover the base case of people “checking out” of their children’s education, but my individualized view doesn’t care about the 90% but the child in front of me.

I’d also posit that this approach to education reduces overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin is capable of.

Very few of the subjects I studied in high school reach the bar of being useful to 5-10% of the students

I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but:

You could make it work if this "everyone forms an LLC in school" initiative comes with "everyone gets a chunk of cash to invest into this business". I assume the time would come from restructuring curriculums so that half of your senior year is spent on this project. Maybe add another year onto high school instead that is the Business Year.

This would also require a massive increase in the amount of money going into schools so it's pretty much a non-starter in the US.

As to "optimizing for the 90%", I feel like there's probably a lot of interesting differences in a world where every high school graduate has been in a boss' shoes. Possibly bosses would be able to get away with a lot less shady shit. This probably doesn't help the chances of setting it up either.

I would legit support a law that gives every 18 years old 50k to decide what to do in their life. And to adjust it with life.

As a society we would be making a better long term investment in the economy.

And give them good education, but most importantly examples we can.

You haven’t lived very long have you. Because this belays a fundamental misunderstanding of how most people work.

I did not care for the performance review practices at Apple (and it is probably similar in every other big corporation).

We'll give you a 1 to 3 rating in three categories (it's been a while, something like: "Expertise", "Innovation", "Teamwork"). A "1" means you did not meet expectations, a "2" means you met expectations and a "3" means you exceeded expectations.

If we give you a "1" in anything, you should probably start to look for a job elsewhere.

We can't give you a "3" in two of the categories above however. Well, we can but then we have to go up the management chain — perhaps even to the director — because giving someone a "3" in more than one category means we have to raise your "grade". And moving up a grade is a Big Deal. We can only have so many top-tier engineers.

Oh, and regardless of what your manager thinks of you, all managers have to report to their manager for what we call a "leveling session". Here your manager needs to defend their choices when compensating their direct reports in front of all the other managers and of course their boss as well.

Something in particular we're looking to make sure of is that your manager rewards some of their direct-reports with bonuses, a raise, etc. but "punishes" others. Egalitarianism is frowned upon.

> maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion

Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan because everyone is optimizing for promotion

Aligning those incentives is not your job, but your manager's. If they want you to do that job they should pay you for that job. Don't work for free.