Why Promotions Rarely Go to the Best Engineers

Most of us were told promotions are a reward for being good at the job. In this episode we explain why that’s mostly a comforting fiction — and why the strongest engineer on a team so often isn’t the one who climbs.

We get into what actually gets rewarded: visibility, articulacy, and being associated with things that went well. We look at it fairly from both sides — the engineer doing hard, invisible work, and the manager trying to defend quiet excellence in a calibration room that only believes concrete stories.

And we talk about the part that really stings: how promotions compound, so a small early gap in visibility becomes a career-sized gap in title — usually right up until your best engineer quietly updates their CV.

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