dp.cx blog

My director said something offhand on a call recently that stuck with me: promotions codify what's already been happening. By the time someone gets promoted, they've already been doing the work of that next level, and the title is just catching up.

I've been thinking about it since, partly because my wife is going through this right now. She's being "promoted" to team lead at her company - except she's been doing it for months already. She's been pushing for process changes, raising issues with her leadership, handling the things a team lead handles. The promotion isn't giving her new responsibilities, it's putting a title on the ones she already has.

"Team lead" in her case doesn't change the org chart - no one reports to her, no hiring or firing power. It's more like being designated the person who mentors the newer folks and fields the hard questions. She was already doing that, too. And her company's position is that title promotions don't come with extra compensation. So the work doesn't change, the pay doesn't change, but now it's official.

I've seen it from my own side, too. Early on at my current job, it was suggested that I could be promoted to Staff engineer if I pushed on some things - speaking up more on calls, being more visible in certain ways. But the promotion wouldn't come first, instead they wanted to see it happening before they'd formalize it.

Part of me gets it. If you're going to promote someone, it's reasonable to want to see them already operating at that level. You're not betting on potential - you're recognizing what's proven. That feels like the right way to reduce risk on both sides. The person isn't being set up to fail, and the organization isn't guessing.

But there's another side. If someone is already doing the work before the promotion, the organization is getting that labor at a discount. The gap between when someone starts performing at the next level and when they get the title - and the comp - is time the company benefits from without paying for. My wife's situation just makes that more visible because the comp part never comes at all.

I don't know what the fix is. I've written before about not always having solutions, and this is one of those. Companies aren't going to back-pay someone when they promote them. But it feels like there should be something - some acknowledgment that the person was carrying a heavier load before the title caught up. I don't know what that looks like.