Unlocking the Promotion Committee

Sean meets Allison in her Philadelphia office after being passed over for promotion yet again.

Unlocking the Promotion Committee

Listen and choose the right answer

Why was Sean frustrated at the beginning of the conversation?

• He had been passed over for promotion twice and wanted to know why.
• He was being forced to move from Philadelphia to Austin.
• His manager refused to let him do any backend coding.

What main problem did the promotion committee find with Sean's work?

• His code quality was consistently below company standards.
• His invisible glue work lacked clear metrics and documented impact.
• He spent too much time attending unnecessary calibration meetings.

What surprise did Allison reveal to Sean?

• She had never received a promotion in her entire career.
• She was planning to leave the company next month.
• She was in the exact same situation five years ago and showed him her old packet.

What is their plan of action for the upcoming week?

• To rewrite Sean's promotion packet focusing on metrics and cross-functional impact.
• To request a completely new engineering ladder framework from HR.
• To stop doing all glue work and focus only on bug fixing.

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Allison: I'm glad you brought it up, Sean, because we owe it to you to be completely transparent about the ____ .
• Sean: Frankly, I find it hard to understand how my ____ was rejected when I've been delivering core backend features for months.
• Allison: The committee didn't doubt your coding skills, but they consider it essential to see a much broader ____ .
• Allison: That's exactly the issue, Sean; you're doing vital ____ , but you're treating it as invisible work that doesn't need documentation.
• Sean: That feels like a bureaucratic trap where if you don't brag about every single bug fix, you simply don't exist on the ____ .

Sources: photo by ANTONI SHKRABA production on Pexels