How to NOT get Promoted
Nov 14, 2025
There are a lot of guides & docs about what you should do to get promoted, but not much about the typical mistakes most people make, despite following all that other advice.
Why this doc? I originally posted this doc internally at Google, where I’ve served as Manager and IC for 16+ years & participated in dozens of promo committees. I’ve seen many solid promo attempts fail because the right evidence was not presented in a convincing way. The doc is a terse distillation of repeated patterns I’ve observed, and was requested by many to post it publicly.
This doc is from the perspective of Software Engineers; including Individual Contributors (ICs), Tech Leads (TLs), and Managers (TLMs). The vocabulary & expectations may not apply to other fields.
In order to not get promoted, …
How You Work
- Read all the design docs
- While not making forward progress on the specific task assigned to you.
- Build an awesome system
- Without writing a design doc for it first.
- Start a design doc
- But never finish it.
- Finish a design doc
- But build something completely different, and never update the design doc afterwards.
- Write a design doc
- But skip sharing it with others on your team.
- Write a design doc and share it with others
- But fail to respond to any of the comments left by others.
- Write a design doc, respond to comments
- But skip following up with approvers/reviewers, leaving the doc unapproved for a long time.
- Write a design doc, follow up with approvers/reviewers and discuss open comments offline
- But skip documenting the final resolution with rationale and closing the comments
- Write a design doc
- The week before Promo Packets are due (yes, I have seen this happen and it’s obvious from version history…)
- Write great design docs
- But fail to set permissions so the promo committee could view the doc + version history + resolved comments.
How You Collaborate
- Be a great engineer
- But an awful collaborator. (At higher levels, your collaboration skills become more important than pure technical skills.)
- Be a thorough code reviewer
- But nitpick to the point that folks can’t submit any code
- Do community work: interviews, mentorship, hiring committee, etc.
- But not have enough time left over for core technical contributions
- Do a lot of glue work
- But only glue work, ignoring core technical contributions on which you’ll be evaluated
- Do your own tasks diligently
- But refuse to help others because your plate is always full
- Contribute to a bunch of random projects
- But fail to be recognized as an owner / authority / point of contact for any one of them
- Attend a lot of meetings
- With little to show for the time spent in them
- Take full credit for partial contributions
- Promo committees can easily see if two or more people are taking credit for largely-overlapping work. Be precise in what you are claiming as your own, & explain the role of collaborators if you want to get promoted.
Launches
- Run into an issue during launch
- But instead of highlighting how you fixed it, what you learnt and how you grew from it, attempt to cover it up in the promo packet.
- Stay up nights and weekends
- Without identifying or articulating process changes to make it unnecessary to stay up nights and weekends in the future.
- Build and launch an awesome system
- But apply for promo before the launch has been validated in Production (no metrics ⇒ no promo)
- Build and launch an awesome system with metrics
- But fail to explain why it was impactful, or why the metrics matter
- Apply for promotion with a decently-strong packet
- But 6 months too early, while there are still gaps in your next-level readiness in specific areas
Manager Related
- Have a career goal or career development questions in mind
- But fail to have regular in-depth career conversations with your manager
- Work on projects assigned by your manager
- Even though you hate them, without providing this feedback to your manager so they could instead reassign you to something you are passionate about
- Have a perfect story crafted for your career trajectory
- But end up reporting to a manager who cannot convincingly narrate it to a committee
- Have a great packet written by your manager
- But fail to get feedback from a few others to make sure it’s airtight
- Be the senior-most person in every room
- With no senior collaborators who can attest to your readiness at the next level
Mindset
- Obsess about promotion
- Such that every decision at work becomes about whether it will get you promoted or not (Seriously, this does not help at all. Makes things worse for you, your manager, and your team if promo is the only thing on your mind).
- Obsess about promotion
- Ignoring your personal life, family, friends, and overall happiness. Your ultimate goal should be happiness; career progress is but one element of it.
- Assume you are ready for level L+1
- When the overwhelming majority of your peers, collaborators, and your manager repeatedly try to tell you that you aren’t. (Listen to others, read between the lines, and don’t assume you know better)
- Do great work in some months
- But slack off in other months. A consistent growth trajectory is key.
Org
- Keep working hard
- But on the “wrong” team 🤷
- Wrong is subjective, but if you’ve been on a team for > 12-18 months and have not had any major launch or impactful delivery to show for it, that’s not good for your promo case.
- Be ready for promo
- But in an org full of other strong performers, who are all ready for promo in the same cycle.
So you followed all the advice in this doc, applied for promo, and failed. Now here’s how you might get rejected again the next time.
Got rejected?
- Fail to get promoted
- And be sad about it for more than 2 weeks. Take some time to get over it, then get over it.
- Go up a second time for promotion after a rejection
- But fail to directly address the areas for development pointed out by the previous committee/session
Or, if eventually you do get promoted…
Congratulations!
Though, keep in mind: If you do get promoted when you are not fully ready, you risk not being able to meet your expectations at the next level. This can have much more serious consequences than if you had not been promoted in the first place (and thus continued to be measured against previous-level expectations).
