By finishing your assigned work exceptionally fast, you can focus actual effort on the "sharpening the saw" aspects of your role and/or the organization, and helping others.
Those are the workers who (in a competent organization) are promoted.
Genuinely asking, is there any value anymore in promotions when the market seems to reward job hopping every few years? I think promotions were useful when someone worked only one or a few jobs in their lifetime, but it's not so useful anymore. The amount of effort to get promoted is much higher and with much lower reward than simply interviewing at a new place and getting that job within a couple weeks.
> is there any value anymore in promotions when the market seems to reward job hopping every few years?
Depends entirely on the company. Big tech companies are very good at promotions and retention.
The rewards of job hopping also saturate quicker than people expect. Push it too far and it starts to become a negative. When an employer sees a resume that has a new job every 10-12 months for the past 6 years, they're going to assume the employee will be temporary at their own company, as well.
Big tech companies are bad at retention past 4 years. Your initial equity grant will be the largest, and once it fully vests, you’ll see a dramatic drop in comp.
It is if you're actually looking to get promoted to management (for what it's worth). Promotion may also mean getting higher-profile projects.
I don't know about you but the job-seeking process seems like another job itself. If you're good at that job (esp. while executing on your current job) then I guess the world's your oyster.
> By finishing your assigned work exceptionally fast, you can focus actual effort on the "sharpening the saw" aspects of your role and/or the organization, and helping others.
If you're lucky. Mostly it's when there's relaxed oversight over your work, so you can hide the fact that you technically finished your work already and are languishing doing what, to many people, seems like a waste of your time even if you know that's not true.
The bigger the organization is, the more able it is to "promote" or segment it's workforce; and less likely to actually do any changes.
The smaller the organization is, the more it is competent at what it's doing, the faster it can change to adapt. But there are sometimes no practical value to promotions at all.
If your end goal is to get promoted, there are far easier and less demanding ways to get there.
(Not saying that you are wrong - not at all, you're actually quite correct that many of the people that get promoted are over normal performers, usually combined with some other talent or skill.)
Exactly. As a supervisor, of course I give more work to my staff who work faster. This means they get more opportunities to learn, more exposure to good projects, more development, and more opportunities for promotion (if they want that.)
Yes, only a fraction of the work is “good” work in that sense. The fast workers get many more opportunities to get it. It’s like the fast worker buying ten lottery tickets and the slow worker buying one. She who buys ten tickets has ten times the chance of winning, even if she buys nine losers.
That’s not how it works in the companies I have seen. The people who get the “good” work have good connections with management and know about the “good” projects before anyone else. Fast workers just get more work of the same kind if they don’t know about the interesting projects.
I often feel being too good at the daily grunt work makes you too important for that and management wants you to stay there.
The trick is to finish slightly ahead of schedule and spend the free time learning, refactoring, exploring new ideas, testing tools, automating stuff, etc.
Whenever I’ve seen teams formalize this, it’s been cut down by someone higher up who wants to show how they’re saving costs or making the team more efficient. It’s possible I’ve only worked at bad organizations, but I’m willing to bet that s the reason why such “benefits” are not formalized.
However it then leaves you vulnerable to the naive worker who will voluntarily push all gears because they’re such a hard worker.
