I did mention that Colin joined this team because he saw it as a good opportunity for promotion. I thought he was absolutely nuts because he didn’t even deserve his Senior position, yet he was aiming to be among the “big dogs” in the company (often known as Principal Developers). I’m sure you will agree that he has ‘ideas above his station’ if you read the stories I write about him.
Well, now I have egg on my face – because he has been promoted yet again, and I’m still not a Senior. He is two ranks above me now, can you believe that?
I sent messages to some of his old colleagues to inform them of the news. Usually, if you tell someone about a promotion, you will get neutral responses like “ok, now I know who to talk to about X”, or maybe some positive responses like “brilliant, he really deserved it”. Out of 7 responses, what percentage were positive or neutral?
0% positive, 0% neutral. 100% negative. Some people even accused me of lying. I don’t normally put swearing on the blog, but I’ll include this one. Here are the responses:
“What!? I don’t know what to say to that.”
“haahaha are you fucking joking?”
“wtf..what is wrong with the managers?”
“Be prepared for more mistakes”
“wow, how did that happen? God help the world”
“Don’t lie”
I’d like to point out all I said was “Colin has been promoted”. I didn’t tell them what I thought, or preceded it with any statement to influence their opinion.
So the promotion definitely doesn’t have the backing of his colleagues. It makes you wonder how a promotion can go ahead when it is unanimously deemed a bad idea. Well, I’ll keep trying to think of how to make an accurate and fair promotion process.
I did have a conversation with my manager to ask why my promotion didn’t happen. He gave me the usual response I’ve heard in the past to do with budgets and no free spaces for that role. I pointed out that Colin has just vacated a Senior position which I can have.
He was still adamant that the budget was gone and there’s no free spaces anyway. He promised he was doing as much as he could to promote me, and he said he was constantly asking the Head of Development to promote me.
I have to put faith in him, because later that day the Head of Development sent me a message saying how she understands “I am doing a great job and it is appreciated”.
The funny thing is, I’m not even doing a good job at this current moment. I’ve had lots of annual leave, and haven’t had much work assigned since we decided to cut the scope of our recent releases. I’ll probably write about this in more detail shortly.
Stranger Coding Tings 