Is there a glass ceiling for technical roles at most organizations?
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At the moment, most graduate programmers have to leave their company to be promoted. They have to go somewhere else to reach the next level up, and then move to yet another company to reach the level above that, and so on.
But if you're a grad today, your position should be bumped up — to a junior role, then a mid-tier role, etc. — once you meet particular milestones or measures. If that's where you want to be, the organization should figure out what the KPIs will have to be to keep paying you what you are worth, rather than you having to jump ship. Maybe it's because the tech industry is so young, but it feels like we've lost that ethos within organizations that seemed to be prevalent half a century ago.
For so many of the problems that we see, we deal with the symptoms but not the root cause. One of the primary root causes of attrition is that many organizations say, “This is as far as we go with roles in the engineer position that you're in. From now on, we might be able to give you raises that match the inflation rate, but there are no new roles for you.” The forcing function from that message is that if you want to make more money or be more valuable, you have to become something you don't want to become.
That, or you leave the company. That’s how talent, knowledge, etc. leaves the organization. It doesn’t build loyalty, and when we're at our next gig in need of an amazing engineer, they'll quickly bring up that story: “Remember when I became a level five and then after that was topped out, you kind of forced me out? I don't want to do that again.” Breeding that loyalty is key because when I start my next gig, I’ll have three people I can immediately call. If they can't move jobs just yet, then I know they'll call three other people and so on. But to have that network, you can’t burn people by saying, “I'm sorry, but you've hit that glass ceiling.”
More organizations have predefined role tiers and once you hit the most senior you either move to a management role, move to a different department or a different company.
It's sad that if someone is really a good performer and he climbs to the top of the technical chain in the team he needs to look elsewhere for a better title or more pay.
The best way to do this here is to create a new role so that the employee can still progress, assign more responsibilities and give more pay.
We have done this for a certain employee that came to the top layer and in order to keep him, we've created a new higher-end position. It all depends on the organization culture and flexibility, some does not allow flexibilities and Tiers are the same across company, some allow the managers to play around and adjust them to the needs