Things I wish someone told me about getting a promotion

Figure out what the company values, act on it, and demonstrate the impact of your actions to your manager. Even if you are an intrepid type that will walk into your manager's office and ask for a raise, they may inadvertently put you through many more hoops than your peers. In these types of companies, it reflects well for managers to have engineers they manage level up. After the managers submit a recommendation for a specific raise or promotion, it goes to their manager... their manager... their manager, all the way up to our CTO. If a raise or promotion is approved, then it heads over to finance to budget it correctly, and then it comes back to us around 3 months after the process officially started. We have a meeting with our manager that's similar to a 1-on-1 where we go over our performance for the year, goals for next year, and what actually changed in the compensation or title. You'd have to plan this out with your manager in advance. If you want advice on a formal process like this, Gergely Orosz wrote a great post about how to write a self-evaluation recently - from the perspective of an Engineering Manager at Uber.