
Ask HN: Evaluation/promotion depends not on my past performance? - ds_anon_
I am wondering what to think of my current company in this situation:<p>I am a data scientist, working for about 19 months at bigcorp since graduating with a masters in AI. Past 6 months, I have been working to get a promotion. Manager and I have set a few benchmarks, and I feel I meet all the criteria. Manager and colleagues say good things about my performance.<p>Fast forward to now. I will move from a business department to an IT department, still be a data scientist there and do basically the same things. (creating ml solutions and bringing them to production)<p>Manager doesn&#x27;t want to give me the promotion until I have spoken with the general IT manager and my future, lower IT manager, which will be selected next month. They have to approve my promotion, taking input from my current manager and IT colleagues I work with.
The thing is, both my manager and his manager say that my skills meet all the criteria for a promotion - that my performance has been good. But I need to wait for a conversation with a yet to be chosen manager at IT to get the promotion. The reason for this is to &quot;ensure harmony within IT&quot; and to make sure that my promotion &quot;fits the context in which I operate within the company&quot;. I have protested that I should be reviewed based on my past performance and market value, not my future context, but they have simply refused this.<p>What should I think of this? What would you do?
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anigbrowl
Network with your fellow employees and consider threatening to leave. The
basic dynamic of work, especially in a large corporation, is to extract value
from you, not to maximize your utility. Each manager down the chain is in turn
trying to maximize their executive power to climb up the chain. Developing
your career as a valued employee is distinctly secondary to the strategic
considerations each manager faces in trying to maximize their own benefit. If
you're doing a good job right now, the manager wants to keep you on his team
rather than give you away to someone in IT, with whom the business department
is in competition for influence in the C-suite. Your manager doesn't derive
any great benefit from giving you away to another department; the nice
virtuous feeling of maximizing the collective good does nothing to advance his
political position or help him meet his targets next quarter after you've
gone. It just presents him with the annoying problem of trying to replace you,
which is actual work.

You should read Smith & Bueno de Mesquita's _The Logic of Political Survival_
, or the simpler version presented for a more general audience _The Dictator
's Handbook_. Corporations are not little meritocratic democracies, they're
zero-sum dictatorships with nice architecture. There are politics in academia,
of course, but ultimately it's an unselfish environment dedicated to the
maximization and democratization of knowledge. The business world offers
similar looking campuses and promotes collegiality among employees etc., but
to a very different end.

Since you're a data scientist, why not (either at home or during, cough,
'spare' time at work) look into the work above and start running agent-based
simulations examining the structure of authoritarian hierarchy and
informational asymmetries? Imagine an internal economy in which there's a
floating exchange rate between information and authority, and two flavors of
information: external and internal. You could og course look for emergent
behaviors but since your firm already has an org chart and that's probably
available somewhere on the corporate servers then you should probably use that
as a real-world benchmark for your, ah, researches.

It would be most interested to hear of your findings via gmail. Protip: people
in the business department like talking about The Big Picture ( _saying_ this
in terms of meeting collective corporate mission goals, _meaning_ the drama of
climbing the internal corporate ladder), and think of knowledge workers like
your good self as borderline autistic for not being able to see the obvious
path of going into management and getting other people to do the grunt work
while they wield actual power.

On the plus side their relative lack of technical comprehension means you
enjoy great flexibility in exactly how you structure your time and what
results you produce, because managements' understanding of complexity and
difficulty largely comes from you int he first place. Basically, your manager
has power over you by and has no intention of cluing you in on his personal
career strategy/politics, and you're confused because you know his stated
explanations are bullshit.

It is perfectly OK for you to play this game back by pretending to accept his
bullshit and strategically exploiting the resources available to you for your
own gain as long as you give him a good story about what you're working on
now. The downside is you won't get paid as much as if you got the promotion.
But corporate doesn't care about _you_ ; the promotion is just a carrot to
persuade you to work harder where you currently are. Put on a display of
humility and drone-like belief in the wisdom of your manager (which I assure
you he will be delighted to believe), then express your eagerness to pursue
and aggressive new target that will redound to his glory. (Use the word
'aggressive' in describing it, this is a holy term among professional managers
and will briefly cause his brain to stop working properly.) Emphasize the
difficulty and novelty of the task you are about to take on and persuade him
that you're ready to prove yourself again, all of which will appeal to his
ego. Your goal here should be to devote about 50% of your work time to
actually achieving whatever it is you have promised to do, and to apply the
rest of your time to the improvement of your own strategic position. Make both
considerations look like part of the same project and give him overly detailed
technical explanations of how clever it is until he stops listening and gives
you the go-ahead.

~~~
ds_anon_
Thanks for your reply.

I will 'aggressively' pursue implementing that simulation right away, sir ;)

> Network with your fellow employees and consider threatening to leave.

I did exactly that, 6 weeks ago, and they now come with this bs. I am not
enjoying the office politics thing and I have an offer at a startup. Do you
think there is any sense in leveraging the startup offer to get a better offer
at bigcorp?

Thanks also for the book suggestions.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's certainly worth a try. Startup life can offer great opportunities, but
then Bigcorp can offer much better work/life balances - it really depends on
your individual calculus for time, pay, responsibility, and pressure.

I really hate politics and am like you in that I'd rather focus on outcomes
and optimizing systems. but I avoided and rejected figuring this stuff out at
an earlier age, only to realize that ignoring the existence of politics
confers no immunity from being subject to it.

BTW if you do perform that simulation work I would genuinely be interested in
hearing about it, I have far more ideas than I ave the technical skills/peer
network to implement them :-/

