The dreaded review cycle usually comes once or twice a year at companies. For most this process is annoying or anxiety-provoking. It is also one of the most critical moments for advancing your career with interviewing well being the only one thing that’s more critical!
In this article, we’ll talk about:
How does the review process work in big tech?
What makes a self-review strong and promotion-worthy
What to do when you get constructive feedback from your manager
How to have ongoing conversations with your manager so nobody is surprised when reviews come around
The review process
When you get hired at a company, you should be thinking about the first review process from day one! This isn’t something you should stumble into because it has such an important impact on your advance.
The number one piece of advice in this area is to keep a “brag” document. This document should list out all your wins and who they involved during the review period. Generally speaking, this is something you should be adding to on a weekly basis so you don’t forget all the great work you did over the year.
There are two other critical pieces to the review process at companies:
peer feedback
You can optimize good feedback from your peers by helping them solve their problems, being easy to work with, and having a positive attitude. These things go a long way and I’ve seen many times in my career where a small piece of peer feedback was the difference between whether someone got promoted or not!
The key things for optimizing this feedback should be around your interpersonal skills.
manager feedback
You can optimize this feedback by having a good manager and working to solve their most difficult problems. The bigger and more painful problems you take off your managers plate, the more likely they will give you a glowing review that will make it easier to be promoted. Keeping in mind that if you have a bad manager, like I did at Facebook, no amount of hard work or impact will get them to write you a good review.
Finding a manager who cares is the most critical piece of this puzzle!
The process in doing this happens either in the interview phase or the team selection phase of onboarding.
You should be talking with
Your manager’s manager about their strengths and weaknesses
Your manager’s other reports who are doing well and see what makes them successful
Your manager’s reports that are struggling (this can be hard to see sometimes) to understand what things you should watch out for.
Once you have your self-review, your manager feedback and your peer feedback, this “packet” goes through a series of tests to make sure your impact and rating are in line with other engineers at the company. This process is called calibration.
To shine during calibrations, you should have the following:
Multifaceted impact
Your core area of the business should demonstrate high levels of impact. Especially innovative impact that could be viewed as “incremental” vs what another random engineer might deliver in the same time frame.
This means you should be interviewing for the company to build on your people access. You should be throwing lunch and learns to spread knowledge
This means you should be thinking about tech debt and how to make your team move faster. This area of engineering excellence is especially powerful at Facebook!
Delivering next-level scope with confidence
Beyond the multifaceted impact, you should be taking on projects that are in your growth area. If you’re a senior, you should be looking at staff projects. If you’re a junior, you should be looking at mid-level projects.
If you can demonstrate to your manager that you can deliver at the next level scope over a period of 6-12 months, the case for promoting you becomes much easier because they’ve essentially been underpaying you for that period since you’ve been operating at the next level already!
Showcasing leadership
If your packet just shows, “they guy wrote a lot of code.” That’s not going to be enough to get you promoted beyond senior engineer. You need to be showing innovative mindset and sharing these thoughts broadly. That might mean doing external talks or writing blog posts about your experiences delivering value!
What makes a self-review really strong?
When you’re writing your self-review, you should be thinking of it as your “resume for the last year.” With that in mind, the self-review should be:
Short (preferably one page)
Value-focused
listing every little thing you did will hurt you!
Impact-focused
Listing not what you did but what it changed is a much better flavor of self-review!
Keeping in mind that this isn’t a “review” document even though it’s called that. It’s honestly a sales document. You should be thinking about it like, “what is the easiest and most concise way for me to sell the impact I’ve had at my company over the last year”
If you keep your writing in that style, you’ll find that leadership will be more aware of your impact and what your strengths are!
What to do when you get constructive feedback from your manager
Another important piece of the puzzle for these reviews is you’ll get feedback on where you should improve. Feedback is a gift that you should listen intently to because what they say is often the thing that you need to figure out to get to the next level!
Some feedback I’ve gotten over the years:
Zach works too quickly and doesn’t solicit enough feedback before building
Zach doesn’t listen enough in meetings and cuts people off
Zach is taking on too much and not aware of when he’s getting burnt out
Some of these things are both strengths and weaknesses. “Working quickly” is a great example of something that could be shined as both a strength and a weakness. Being mindful of what leadership is saying to you will help you a lot both in being happier and in getting promoted!
The key mindsets you should adopt when receiving this feedback are:
Assume positive intent and perspective
Feedback is just that, feedback. Sometimes it’s something that is worth changing other times it’s just who you are. Appreciating another person’s perspective on how you work doesn’t always mean you need to make a change
Ask for specifics
Biases are all over the place when it comes to constructive feedback. This is especially more common among neurodivergent workers. Specific and actionable feedback is the best type of feedback because it’s the type with the least amount of bias
Build the constructive feedback into a growth narrative
Being real with your manager about your growth areas will help them trust you more. Transparency builds accountability and trust. It shows that you’re actually willing to make some changes to become a better engineer!
How to have ongoing conversations with your manager so nobody is surprised
If you’re waiting to get feedback every 6 to 12 months, you’re going to have a hard time getting promoted. You should be getting ongoing feedback from your manager on a monthly cadence to truly become the best engineer you can, especially if you have ambitious goals of getting promoted quickly!
When you get hired at a company, you should have a talk with your manager early on about what your career goals are and work with him/her to build an action plan to achieve them. If your manager is unwilling to do this with you, that’s a very gigantic red flag that you should RUN!
Some things to think about are:
What deliverables am I looking to create in the next year?
What behaviors am I looking to change to become more effective?
How to I exhibit behaviors that are inline with my company’s values?
When I was getting feedback at Netflix, one of the big things they were saying to me was, “Zach it’s not about the work that you’re doing, it’s about HOW you get work done that is the problem.”
Remembering that you’re working in an organization with people who have feelings and beliefs is important to getting far in this big tech journey!
I hope you found this newsletter useful! My May 6th cohort on DataExpert.io is going to be going over this career advancement stuff and I hope to see your there! If you use code PROMOTION15 at checkout by April 7th, you can get 15% off!
What other things do you think are important when getting promoted in big tech?
Another key lesson is to learn who gives good peer feedback. This is challenging your first time. But pay close attention to the feedback you get. Some people just do not give good feedback. I’m not talking about positive or negative about you, but the feedback overall is just too vague and unhelpful that your manager will probably throw it out/ignore it as part of the process.