Nah, f that mess. If you find yourself in a place that promotes the weak because it's a buddy system, it's not a place to work long-term. It means your boss is in 'don't rock the boat mode' and that's going to hold you back long term. Your boss should be fighting for promotions for their best workers and enabling growth in responsibility as well.
Oh, in fairness to my boss, he did make a strong effort in the next promotion cycle to get me promoted, which in fairness was only 6 months later.
The issue was the they had a limited budget for promotions, and basically limited it to one person per team. This, by itself wouldn't have bothered me too much, since the person who deserved it most on my team (someone with more experience than me, and was definitely under-leveled) did get promoted that cycle.
What upset me most was that a person on another team (with 1/3 of my experience, with no increased education, and on a team that accomplished nothing (not just my opinion, that team was disbanded a year later)) got promoted to a level higher than me. My direct boss didn't have any control on that team.
Yeah, that clears things up. I think every organization has those dead-weight teams. As long as you put tons of points on your stories in Jira, you look super busy and management gets to see your pretty charts.
