flexagon | Promoted!

I got my promotion. I'm now a Staff Software Engineer at Zillian, aka T6 (technical level 6).

I expected it, but did not expect to hear that I got a rating of Superb for my last six months of work; that's the highest rating you can get, indicating "top 5%" performance, a step above the "promote this person" rating I expected.

In case anyone gives a crap (I don't), my packet wended its way through two committees. The first one said "passes with flying colors; this person has a clear path to level 7 if they switch to the manager track". This is nearly a truism -- it's easier to get to L7 as a manager than as a SWE. The second one was not so positive but still voted to promote; they said the complexity of my work was not 100% evident. My boss was a little apologetic about that (did we maybe not communicate the complexity well enough in the packet?) but I said no worries; valid enough feedback, and I'm not so into the complexity requirement for promotable work anyway. As long as they said yes, who cares. I know how promo committees work, and these bits of feedback are brief and slapped down in thirty seconds after significant discussion has ended; they're not gospel, just some sentences. The important thing is, they -- two small committees composed of T7s or higher, somewhere in the company, to whom my work was not intimately known -- put me above the line.

And so the end of April brings an end to one of my slow projects.