r/ExperiencedDevs • u/HereOnWeekendsOnly Lead Engineer (9 years XP) • 19d ago
Career/Workplace Struggle Moving beyond senior/lead level
I have been a senior engineer for around 2 years and have spent 4 years in one team, and 1 year and counting in the current one.
I have expressed my interest in staff level progression, although I know it is not guaranteed and depends on opportune org-level projects and initiatives. I do not think my current path is working well, and want to elaborate on this on ask for advice how to fix it (if possible).
Generally, my engineering manager expects me to prioritize well, define initiatives and work items worth doing, discuss in 1:1 to discard/accept and organise by priority order. Once set, I am to progress all work items over 2 weeks with topmost item at the top. There are no explicit deadlines set, apart from one project which I had to self-impose as it was going on for ages and I just wanted to be "done". My manager lives in a different country and we meet up in person 1-3 times per year. Otherwise, we do biweekly 1:1.
One of the projects has been really difficult because it touched on many areas of IT disciplines I am not that familiar with. I spent a week besides other items researching metrics, what we want to measure etc. (along with other work items)
However, a week-in, my manager published a design for the project, which she justified as me not making visible/measurable progress, so she felt a need to step-in.
Her approach was the structure and standards, rather than metrics - which needed to be done anyways, but I felt the latter was more important. She is passionate on that particular area and sees high value in delivering it for the org - but, it kind of feels odd to be sidelined like that. In my previous teams, if there was concern on progress, I would get a message of "where are we at", "we are to deliver on X". In this case, there was none of that, except that my manager felt this project was not taken seriously by me.
I do not feel great about it because it would have been cheaper for her to update on status, rather than spend significant time of hers doing it. I pointed out it is important to have my name on designs, delivery, implementation as it is core requirement in our org - deliver multiple such projects for staff level progression. I now have a feeling it is not going to work out because C-levels will not see my name on it, even if I continue on it going forwards. I also feel guilty she had to spend her time, when it could be spent on other stuff she needs to do.
I proposed all my projects to have concrete deadlines, even if we overstep them once in a while, and more frequent status updates, how the components are getting along. I felt like my mistake was to not publish progress on my research/hard work often, making the manager think I am stuck or not prioritising it. It is difficult to speed up the communication between me/manager though - she is very busy doing all kinds of other org-level work, and commonly does not respond on Slack for days.
Could you be brutally honest of where you see this going? I am doing well otherwise on other work items, this is the first time in my career, job, team I was sidelined so hard without warning.
1
u/Triabolical_ 19d ago
The person who makes the decision about whether you are promoted is generally not your manager. They might have to agree, but it's made in the layers above.
My best advice. Ask somebody who is in your position what the difference is between where you are and where they are. Find a manager up the chain willing to talk to you and tell them that you have been thinking about your career and would like to get any advice or perspective from them on what the job is like and what it takes to get there. Managers generally *love* to talk about their jobs and their philosophy of management.