alt Hacker NewsYears of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.
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There is a dual ladder setup. Where you can have Administrator, Systems Engineer, Sr. Systems Engineer, Lead, Architect, Sr Architect, etc. These will have parallel tracks to equiv. management positions for benefits and perks (bonus levels, etc).
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
> Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers.
YoE only gives potential, but are not necessarily sufficient in any career. I've interviewed engineers who learned the narrow job they were doing in 6 months, and then only did that for a few years. Do they have 6 months of experience or 3 years? I'd argue closer to 6 months unless they were doing more. I imagine surgeons are similar, where I'd rather see X number of successful surgeries performed than YoE.
This issue with YoE is also why I'm bothered when HR uses YoE too heavily to base salaries around.
It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...