What happened?

Yesterday, I learned that my L5 to L6 promotion at the large tech company was rejected for the second time. I was upset, even though I knew that it would come this way from talking to multiple people.

My history at the company

I worked in this company for five and half years. I was promoted from L4 to L5 about 3 years ago. For the past two years, I has been working on a very interesting project that solves real problems. The project is not developing cutting-edge technologies; it has almost nothing to do with AI, but people want/need it because it solves real problems in the ecosystem. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to drive the project from 0 to 1.

Time to rethink

I think my promotion was not rejected because of the impact of the project itself, but something else. I don’t want to get into the details here. I am writing this post because I think this is a good opportunity to think about the meaning of life, again.

I want a promotion now, but do I really want it when I look back in my 70s? I really like Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework. For my case, I would ask myself, “do I regret I didn’t climb the company ladder high enough (e.g., retiring as an L8)?” , or “do I regret not trying or achieving something else?”.

When I look at many people at a higher level, I don’t really like their career. This really resonates with one of my friends in the company. He think it is really a poor status to have a high-level status without “your thing”. I wonder, maybe it is more important to own and excel your thing, rather than having a higher level status and X% higher compensation in a company. I am asking myself: where are your interests? Do you want to spend your time thinking about climbing the ladders, or doing something interesting so your minimize your regret when you are 70.