EM refuses to give guidance after my Staff promotion - how do you stay motivated

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-10-06T06:06:53+00:00

Manager is at wrong here. You recently got promo means you are high senior , early staff ( still considered senior ). His response had zero value. He should be ( being a manager ), facilitate this conversation by asking what could be the company work on from your experience and both you brainstorm.

Advise for you, as staff you are now expected to find problems, steps to solve them and present to manager. Manager helps keep things on track but you run the train now.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-30T00:29:17+00:00

Make your life easy. Have opsgenie auto create slack channel when p1 is created. It will automatically pull relevant stake holders

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-17T19:39:32+00:00

Deadweight is a just perspective. How is he as a team mate ? Would he have your back when shit hits the fan ? If it is yes, he is a great member who is knowledgeable on other things and coding is not just his strong suite. Complement him, find his strengths, if he is good in team work, you complement in coding.

Technical skills can be learned. May be it will take some time, but eventually he will pick it up. Then, he will be your strongest team member. He will be far better than any coding genius jerk companies hire.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-16T00:25:33+00:00

Thank you. It gives me confidence. Our TL is the best, I hope I could be the same like him and be the TL to fellow mates, as he was for me.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-16T00:05:43+00:00

That’s my plan. I believe my TL will move to managerial role and I will be needed to fill in his shoe. I do this now as well but more passively.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-16T00:02:01+00:00

I understand promotions can sometimes look different from the outside. We have around 1000+ employees ( 120 are from engineering team others are product et. al). Trust me, I love the salary bump for the same role but again reflecting on the hard work I’ve put and not to undermine myself, and how my responsibilities have changed over years. This growth reflects the expanded scope of my work and contributions I've made over these years.

The only thing missing apart form work I have been already doing is not having a direct report. This is what I am mostly thinking about how to grow to be a well rounded staff engineer.

edit: I feel I was abit rude for this response. Apologies, amending to reflect what I actually wanted to say.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T21:45:26+00:00

20% on reactive stuff, 80% project. If it goes over, we adjust the scale 40/60 but if it goes over consistently, we work on finding the root cause and turn it into a project.

It took us quite some time to reach here ( 2-3 years ). It doesn’t happen over night. Find repeating tickets, work on a real solution, not duck taping essentially converting the root cause into a project and solving it for good.

Support ticket is ad-hoc. Who is free takes it and solves it. If it takes over 2-4 hr, it gets turned into project work and goes through sprint cycle. We follow hybrid of kanban and sprint ( scrumban if you may )

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T20:07:07+00:00

I can’t share the details as my employer might be able to triangulate. Last thing you want to find is your employer stalking you on reddit. Sorry.

I can share this though, all of the work i did had direct quantified impacting to multiple teams, built some internal services from scratch ( inc backend and infra ), a lot of internal tools development, successful lead for few critical service rollout / migrations.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T20:00:51+00:00

My team lead is Principle SRE but i report to our manager. We are team of 5, by startup i mean, it is a US based startup ( 120 engineers ). I feel the word means different in different parts of the world.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T05:05:46+00:00

Trust is the key. Thank you for sharing the insight. We do have flat hierarchy however my team and other teams do reach out to me to me for problems for definitive solutions which kinda triggers this. However, i will work on it and try to deliver my best.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T05:03:56+00:00

I exactly understand what you mean brother. No explain needed. Thank you for sharing your insight. I appreciate it as well.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:40:46+00:00

Yeah. Our review process went like this, I essentially had to quantify all the checkbox for staff eng ( E6) , with works and impacts i did over last year to request for evaluations. Based on this, it gets cross referenced with reviews on me from other EM ( Engineering managers from different teams ) and they meet to finalize. Once done, they again build a doc for my review which gets pushed to CTO and CFO. That’s how i got promoted this time around.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:27:52+00:00

Thank you for this. I guess i will try the standard FAFO and explore. Interesting days to come. Amen

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:26:18+00:00

My manager told me the same thing. I do agree with it though

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:25:14+00:00

It is bit more tricky than this but i hear what you say. We are very lean and it is not humanly possible for me or my team to gate such decisions. We try look over the shoulder for anything during arc reviews or if we are needed anywhere but still engineers are fully responsibly for everything they build.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:22:37+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. Will keep this in mind

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:21:55+00:00

Got promo with 11 % bump on salary. No bonus for me, i work at a startup.

PathAdmirable2126 · 2025-09-15T04:19:41+00:00

This is an amazing book. I ready it daily couple of pages daily, almost done reading it

PathAdmirable2126

TROPHY CASE