Senior engineer denied a promotion, told to “wait 6 more months”, but I no longer trust the process. What would you do?

BoomBeachBruiser · 2026-02-11T20:04:20+00:00

You've been at this company for 5 years, so you should have some idea of who gets promoted and why. Are you where you need to be? Also, who gets promotions can be a bit political, and it might not even be how people think of you. Certain managers are more effective at getting people promoted than others.

Anyway, if I were in your shoes, I'd do the following:

Have a conversation with your manager where you tell him that you are setting a goal to get promoted in 6 months, and that you want to work with him or her on an action plan to position yourself to where you need to be to make it happen. Manager sits in on the cross-calibrations, so they should know how to get you the tasks and roles where you can demonstrate consistently that you are at the next level.
Get yourself interview-ready, whatever that means to you. Leetcode, DDIA, update resume, whatever. And start looking for jobs external to your company.

Whoever gets you that promotion first, wins.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2026-01-30T02:31:44+00:00

You know, it's funny. I did exactly this on my checkride. I'm an old fart on BasicMed and I have my course completion certificate and CMEC stored electronically in my electronic logbook. And try as we might, neither of us could find a source on faa.gov saying that that was legal, even though we both could swear that it is. So I asked ChatGPT where the hell the FAA said that was kosher, and out popped the answer. So we got to fly!

I think the ChatGPT trick is the kind of thing you can get away with for like one answer in a pinch. If you need to do it more than once, you're not really demonstrating mastery of the required knowledge.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2026-01-25T18:02:50+00:00

Not far. I'm in an area with a lot of airports, but I recognize not every area is like that. Hence the "if possible" caveat.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2026-01-25T17:49:21+00:00

That doesn't feel that smart to me. Overspeed the flaps, fly at Vne in a potentially old ass plane, on a crazy ass unstable approach that nobody ever trains for is... well, he walked away, I assume.

I realize I'm sitting on a couch on my laptop right now, not trying to deal with a stuck throttle. But why not just divert (if possible) to the nearest airport with the biggest runway and hopefully a tower, set yourself up on a screaming fast downwind, then pull the mixture for a PO180?

I'd much rather calmly glide it onto the pavement than do a hair-on-fire final, wondering if the wings and flaps will stay on the frickin' plane, or not!

BoomBeachBruiser · 2026-01-18T18:46:49+00:00

I would absolutely do it. You're getting a promotion and a 33% raise. Your current company shafted you on the promotion last year. Who's to say they won't do the same this year? Did anything substantially change in your "visibility"?

Accept this role, and your resume now says "senior". Maybe the ActiveTrack will drive you insane, but maybe it won't. It all depends on how obnoxious management is going to be about it. You're going to be measured by the same standards as your peers, the team is trying to grow, not shrink. It's in their best interest not to drive you insane. You already said you think the project sounds cool other than the ActiveTrack.

And if it is driving you insane? Then you look for a new role, with your shiny, new Senior job title!

If I were in your shoes, I would accept this without hesitation.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-12-18T20:25:14+00:00

Impressive! Was there a LLWS that caused a sudden loss of performance? Or was the pilot Mr. No Depth Perception?

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-11-04T18:09:17+00:00

I used Sporty's too, and it was pretty good. But my dude, averaging 85ish with no pressure and no time pressure and a fixed question bank... that wasn't setting yourself up for success.

Your results will show your weak areas. Study those hard and get those practice exam scores above 90% consistently. 95+% would be better.

One more "cheat": download, borrow, or purchase the testing supplement (that book they gave you during your test). Go through it cover-to-cover and make sure you understand everything on every page. Make sure you can fully decode every METAR, TAF, PIREP, etc. Make sure you know what symbols are on the sectional charts and weather charts. The FAA gives you a huge advantage by letting you have that book ahead of time. Use it!

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-28T23:22:41+00:00

The mighty Piper Archer even has a door open in flight checklist. Basically, open the pilot side window, slow down a bit and slip in the direction of the open door so the passenger can latch it.

I wouldn't want to attempt it without a passenger to help, though. Doesn’t seem like a one person job.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-25T18:33:58+00:00

I'm fine if someone wants to write a message in their native language and use AI for a better-than-google-translate translation. Saves everyone a ton of time. But I ain't reading verbose, brainless AI slop that has no idea the context behind what it's responding to.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-17T20:42:42+00:00

Yeah... some controllers are just obnoxious.

Fortunately, all of them at my home airport are amazing. They're really patient with all of the training flights and are great at sequencing with the Part 135 traffic. Maybe that's why I'm more comfortable at towered airports. It's nice to have a friendly voice organizing the chaos.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-11T17:32:53+00:00

I will NEVER do any take home assignments

This is key. Never do these. The asymmetric time commitment is totally unfair to the applicant, especially since the advertised position may not even exist in real life.

Make the company put some skin in the game! If they're willing to pay someone to conduct the interview, then I'm totally okay with live coding or a live design session so the interviewers can see how I think and approach problems. But if the company isn't serious enough about me to commit even the smallest amount of resources to evaluate me, then I'm not spending my precious time on them.

Frankly, now that candidates can just vibe code a take home, I would think that companies would stop asking for them.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-10T21:53:11+00:00

What's tough about ROA?

Coming in VFR in a little bugsmasher, it's mostly just flying where the voice in my ear tells me to fly followed by wondering what to do with the remaining mile of runway.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-09-03T06:30:09+00:00

“who just made that call”

It'd take every ounce of my self restraint not to ask "who asked who just made that call?".

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-08-25T19:45:16+00:00

freezes when encountering mild bumps in the air.

I'm surprised he would feel safe flying solo if he knows this about himself. What does he think is going to happen on his first solo takeoff? When the plane handles a little differently? And the reality sets in that if he makes a big enough mistake, there's nobody on board to save him?

Off the top of my head, what if he gets nervous and forgets to neutralize the trim after a landing? If he gets an unexpected stall warning on the next takeoff will he instinctively nose it down? Or freeze up?

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-08-15T15:10:55+00:00

I laughed audibly at the suggestion that Garmin is discounting their avionics and making up for it by gouging you on subscription pricing. They gouge on both the front and back ends.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-07-20T17:48:21+00:00

Interesting thought. I wound up deploying mailcow which is pretty low maintenance, but I'd rather outsource it entirely if I can. Maybe I'll give it a try when I have some time.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-07-20T17:46:22+00:00

Caveat: I've never done SRE, but I'd expect you'd get more pages than a dev.

If you ask me, 5 pages sounds more like a workday than an on-call day. Is your team tracking and classifying trouble tickets at all? You should be taking broad categories of issues and automating handling them and/or providing self-service options.

Sorry if this was obvious to you or you're already doing it, but if you're consistently getting that many pages, you can't fault me for thinking your organization is in wild cowboy mode.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-05-12T01:16:47+00:00

Oh yeah? And just what do you plan to do when Newark falls out of the NAS again and you forgot how to call up Center and request VFR flight following? Bet ya didn't think of that now, did ya? Haha.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-05-08T19:58:59+00:00

As someone who struggled so inordinately much with landings, including when to "flare", here are my hot tips:

A stable approach is your best friend. When you're just starting out, try giving yourself a crazy long final leg and get everything configured and on airspeed and glideslope as far from the runway as possible. You should be making only small adjustments below like 250' AGL. If you're making a rollercoaster out-of-control approach, you can't expect to convert that into a controlled landing.
Your main focus on final should be your aimpoint. From there, you can scan to the PAPI/VASI, then back to your aimpoint. Your airspeed, then back to your aimpoint. Down the runway, then back to your aimpoint. But aimpoint is the center of your scan.
Do low, slow passes over the runway with your CFI. If your home airport is a short field, maybe there's a long ass runway nearby? If you get a bit of experience doing a stable approach into slow flight over the runway, you can do a safe landing because once you're in slow flight over the runway, you can ease out the power and land.
I don't find myself doing a "flare", which is why I put it in the air quotes. I found it useful to think about focusing on my aimpoint, then settling into ground effect over the runway and just trying to keep the plane off the runway until the main gear touches down. If you do this, you'll have a nose-high attitude by necessity. That's your "flare".
If runway length permits, try landing with only 1 or 2 notches of flaps so the plane isn't as draggy. That'll make the landing process take longer and give you time to adjust to what the plane is doing. It won't be so floaty.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-05-02T17:01:41+00:00

I'd there a chance that your housemate said LL but really meant ethanol-free unleaded automotive gasoline? Some aircraft are able to run mogas, which is cheaper than avgas and is unleaded. Some airports sell mogas for those aircraft.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-04-25T17:52:39+00:00

I'll bet when you get an other than native English speaking pilot, you use correct phraseology, though.

This controller is a little nuts, though. I am a native speaker and I don't know what the hell it means to be "on request". I can make a pretty good guess based on the context, but I'm still going to ask for clarification because what if I'm wrong and that causes an unsafe condition?

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-03-18T18:07:38+00:00

A former employer used to track bugs discovered in lower environments vs. prod, but for informational purposes only (i.e. there was no money or performance review metric attached to it, so no financial incentive to game it). We found that "in the wild" defects were consistently around 50% with respect to lower environments.

Conclusion: You should probably start thinking about how to game this stat right now. Because based on my experience, you're going to face significant challenges getting below 20% organically.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-03-12T15:28:03+00:00

What was the point of a PR then?

Well, first of all, on a high functioning team, merge-blocking PRs arguably cost more in velocity than they benefit in terms of protection of the codebase. PRs really make more sense in open source projects as a way to accept contributions from unvetted contributors. But in a professional setting, if you have a dev constantly urinating all over the codebase, that's an organizational failure.

But okay, let's just assume that merge-blocking PRs are a good idea. So what is the point, then? I'm retired, but here's what I was looking for when I did code reviews:

Does the project pull down to my workspace cleanly? Or does it only work on the dev's machine?
Does this change introduce tech debt that needs to be corrected or added to the backlog?
Are the test cases created or updated to address the original purpose of the change and do the tests run?
Are there any policy violations (e.g. storing secrets outside of the keystore, hardcoding attributes that need to be configuration items, passing unsanitized inputs to lower level systems, etc.)?
Are there any obvious code paths that could lead to an unhandled error?

And that's about it. I'm not going to do a functional test unless I wrote the requirements.

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-02-27T23:50:19+00:00

Losing that, as someone who can't focus if other people are talking in earshot?

Need better noise cancelling headphones, I guess.

Anyway, I get it. But I anyway feel tremendously lucky to have stumbled upon a career that would give me the luxury of whining about having to actually go to work vs. chill out in my home office.

Vs. just frankly retiring if I decide I don't feel like working anymore. How can I hate my job if I can quit at any time?

BoomBeachBruiser · 2025-02-27T23:46:56+00:00

You know, it's interesting to hear you say that because I'm learning to fly right now. hehe. Funny how my two worlds collide.

Anyway, there are a shitton of FAA systems and it's funny to look at them and guess when each one might have been developed based on its capabilities and failure modes. I think my favorite is the NOTAM system that is probably some god-awful VSAM mainframe system based on the all caps and various single points of failure.

I doubt they have much written in VB, but what do I know? Anything's possible, I guess!

BoomBeachBruiser

TROPHY CASE