Author here. My manager and I discussed lengths about the capabilities they do, and it is just like this. It's not his fault at all. It's a game at the end of the day, and it's your choice whether or not you want to keep on playing

Having been at G and also getting denied promo several times consecutively, it's almost always a manager's fault. They're either not bringing the committee feedback to you properly or not representing your work well in that room. Either way it's a sign that they're unable to do better, and you're better off not reporting to the long term.

Do you think retrospectively your manager may not have been as supportive of you as you had thought?

You missed promo 3 times, and when you left he didn't try to counter you. Is it possible s/he might have been blocking you?

I think counter offers in general are pretty rare, especially in a bad job market. Like unicorn rare. In almost 30 years I’ve never left a company where it was even mentioned during the resignation. The company just says “Well, bye.” Like the Tombstone meme.

Counteroffers for lower-level engineers are fairly rare. These companies believe that L4s are sufficiently common that another one will come along. It’s unfortunate especially when an L4 is seriously outperforming their level. But that’s a big company for you.

Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.

Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.

Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.

If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.

In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.

The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.

I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.

TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.

Also, one thing I forgot to mention that I think is really important...

If the company is prepared to offer you a big enough raise to tempt you to stay, and able to organise that raise at short notice, why didn't they value you enough to give you that raise before then?

Ditto. From all the places that I’ve quit, the only counter offer I’d accept would be “we’ll implement this structure/process change that is slowly killing your will to work here”.

Managers will happily make that promise. Just keep in mind that it's likely an empty one.

Yeah it honestly feels like the problem here – it's a common pattern where someone tries several times at a promo, then transfers to another team and gets promoted immediately.

Honestly, I’ve worked at everything from small to medium lifestyle companies, startups, Big Enterprise, BigTech, and now Í am a staff consultant at a third party AWS consulting firm across 10 jobs.

In all of those jobs, I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.

At the jobs where I was responsible for strategy, one of my conditions for employment was I would be reporting directly to a director or CTO.

> I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.

They are doing exactly what they are paid to, which is communicate decisions made above them to the people doing the work.

You are correct - that is a powerless position. That's by design. Work isn't a democracy.

Depends on the effectiveness of your union

If only there were some sort of way employees could get together and like... I don't know, use their labo- I mean, work energy as lever- I mean, to convince management to recognize their uni- I mean, get their boss to pay them more.

I have worked several union jobs, collective contracts usually don't touch the promotion process. If they do they often give automatic promotions after X years where X is still a fairly high number. And obviously this is not a great strategy for many reasons.

Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.

All of this is true, though it's definitely worth noting that some managers are better than others at advocating for the promotion of their top performers.

Getting a manger who is too passive, or too checked-out, or just plain doesn't like you, can literally set you back in your career advancement by years.

Get lumped in with the wrong manager, in the eyes of the VP positions, and it can deadend your whole career. They can be a decent manager too. But if they aren’t compatible with their boss, it will burn you all the same.

Hard disagree.

At Google, in most orgs, manager can influence the chance of success significantly:

- Making sure their team works on what the org leads find "impactful"

- Facilitating cross team collaborations, which will lead to good peer reviews for your report

- Helping your report write the promo packet

- Presenting the promo case effectively during the calibration meeting and being prepared to advocate for the report and respond to criticism from other managers at the meeting

- etc.

There are many managers that do very few if any of these things, and it shows.

Yes, there are quotas, but nonetheless the manager plays a big role in whether their report makes the cut.

There is no harm in saying that you are quitting because you do not feel valued / rewarded enough. Hopefully it will effect change in the manager. Of course it's best to keep it polite and not burn any bridges in the process.