Promotions in other companies are usually in the year’s budget, so the number of seats is known in advance.

The only question is who gets to level up, and it becomes a dancing chair competition with none of the participants having a direct say (managers will take feedback and do whatever they want with it).

For a small and growing company it’s not rare for higher ups to explicitely fish around for people to promote as they just need to grow the ranks. The bigger it becomes the harder the competition is.

What you describe sounds like an equally broken process.

I like (what I've seen) at my workplace. We've designed a rubric across multiple dimensions (basically leveled epectations at each role, software engineer 1 through 4 plus two levels of principal engineer). Everyone knows what is expected at each level. You have goals tied to personal and team initiatives. Managers are limited in the count for direct reports and work daily with their teams, and the they also often solicit feedback on strengths and opportunities for growth from direct reports for teammates who have more interaction with each other. Managers then all get together and level set on performance and promotions. Managers have to defend a promo and performace with data. It helps protect against rubber stamping and from being overly hard. Sure there is a budget that is taken into account, and that is life. We announce all internal promotions, and when you know the person, you always can agree it was deserved. I've been promoted multiple times and have increased my salary a lot each time.

To be honest, this sounds pretty much like the same process as Google, with the main significant difference being that the promotion is approved by committee. But even then the purpose of that would seem to be exactly the same as your statements "Managers then all get together and level set on performance and promotions. Managers have to defend a promo and performace with data." It's just done with more formality at Google due to their size and desire for equitable treatment across teams.

I’ve literally gotten 1 promotion in a 15 year career. Every other title and salary change was from switching jobs.

I have also never gotten a “promotion” in over 20 years and only twice have I gotten a meaningful raise and they were both around $10K and that was early in my career.

I stayed at one company for 9 years and made only $7K more in year 9 than I made in year 2. I stuck around mostly because of side businesses that I was hoping would turn into full time businesses.

But I did learn my lesson. A company has exactly two years to at least get me to local market value.

Now being on the other side of the bell curve, after working for 5 companies over the last 10 years, I either have to settle with just cost of living raises or move into an area that I am qualified for but doesn’t really excite me - consulting (“digital transformation consultant”, “cloud consulting”, etc.)

What was your longest stay at a company?

5 years at the one that promoted me.

Sure but all big, desirable tech companies have almost identical promotion processes: every 1.5-8 years (with higher levels generally taking longer) you get a title/full level bump. And the biggest, hardest bumps are always the bumps from IC to manager. Yeah it’s a shitshow but there’s much less diversity in process than you seem to think