Chapter 11. Career Advancement

“Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.”

—Fred Hoyle (1915–2001)

In any reasonable company, the most important steps you can take to help advance your career are to do good work, be a team player, innovate, and make a modest and constant effort to ensure that your manager and a reasonable circle of others are aware of your contributions. If corporations had a way to effectively monitor and accurately evaluate their staff, perhaps that would be enough. Unfortunately, the real world is so far from that ideal that it’s shocking. I can honestly say without any hesitation that over the past 20 years in the software development, I’ve seen every manager I know work extremely hard to be as fair as possible to their employees and make sure that every employee had both opportunities for advancement and the fairest evaluation possible. No matter how hard we all tried across the industry, we never succeeded in transforming evaluations and promotional assessment beyond the murky waters of approximation and expert judgment. That’s where you come in: Knowing just how unscientific the process is, and with a bit of insight on the process used to produce your evaluation or candidacy for promotion, you can take a few steps to bias the process in your favor. That bias can help you get the best evaluation you deserve (but unlikely one that is better), which is a huge improvement over something better described as random.