The Merit Drama
What Your Leader Knows That You Don't
It’s merit season again, and somewhere in your company, a spreadsheet is being fought over.
Your leader is in a room with their peers, arguing why you deserve 8% while someone’s advocating their report should get 10%. Budget is fixed. Someone’s going home disappointed. The question is: did you give your leader the ammunition they needed to fight for you?
Most merit increase articles tell you to “align with company goals” and “have regular one-on-ones.” That’s like telling someone to “play good tennis.” It’s not wrong, it’s just useless. After watching plenty of these battles from the leader’s side of the table, here’s what actually matters.
The Survive/Scoreboard Shift
Early in your career, money is survival currency. You need it for rent, for finally replacing that IKEA desk that wobbles, for feeling like an actual adult. The difference between $85k and $95k is material. It changes what you can do.
Then something shifts. You’re comfortable. You’ve got the decent apartment, the emergency fund, maybe even some index funds you pretend to understand. Now that raise isn’t buying you much more life. It’s buying you information. Money becomes a scoreboard.
The person next to you got 8%, you got 3%. The message is clear, even if your manager wraps it in “really appreciate your contributions” language. The scoreboard tells you exactly what your company thinks of your value relative to everyone else.
Here’s the trap: once money becomes a scoreboard, you become emotionally vulnerable in a way you weren’t before. That 3% raise doesn’t threaten your lifestyle, but it absolutely threatens your self-worth. This is why merit season creates drama. It’s not really about the money anymore.
Understanding this shift is critical because it changes your strategy. In survival mode, you optimize for getting paid more. In scoreboard mode, you optimize for being seen as valuable. These require different tactics.
The Visibility Tax
Here’s what I see from the leader’s chair that most engineers miss: your actual work quality is only one part of your merit increase. The other part is whether the right people know about it.
I’ve watched brilliant engineers get mediocre raises while decent engineers who are skilled at visibility get promoted. It’s not fair. It’s also reality.
The “visibility tax” means that if you’re not making your work visible to the people who matter, you’re leaving money on the table. Your leader can’t fight for you in that budget meeting if they can’t articulate your impact. And they can’t articulate it if you haven’t given them the narrative.
Three tactics that actually work:
1. The Win List - Keep a running list of your wins in your shared one-on-one notes with your leader. After completing any significant work, add a brief entry: what you did, what impact it had (with numbers if possible), how it connects to company priorities. Update it before every one-on-one. Your leader will pull directly from this list when writing your performance review. Make their job easy.
One caveat: this only works if your leader is functional and engaged. If your one-on-ones keep getting canceled, if your leader doesn’t review the shared notes, if they seem checked out, your win list is just shouting into the void. In that case, you’re not dealing with a merit increase problem. You’re dealing with a leader problem, and that’s a different conversation entirely.
2. The Strategic Slack Message - When you solve something, post about it in relevant channels. Not bragging, framing it as helping others avoid the same problem. “Ran into X issue with Y system, here’s how I debugged it.” Your leader’s peers see this. It counts.
3. The “Thought I’d Share” Forward - When someone thanks you for helping them, forward it to your leader with “Thought I’d share this.” Don’t editorialize. Let the praise speak. Do this 2-3 times per quarter, not more (or you look desperate).
These feel manipulative if you’re used to thinking “good work speaks for itself.” It doesn’t. Good work that’s been narrated to the right audience speaks for itself.
The Strategy Trap
Every company has a strategy. Vision says “we’re going here,” strategy says “we’re taking this route.” Most engineers think following the strategy guarantees rewards. It doesn’t.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: following the strategy makes you visible only when the strategy is working. When the strategy succeeds, everyone who contributed gets credit. When it fails, everyone who contributed gets forgotten, and the company pivots to Plan B.
The real winners play a different game. They follow the strategy and they prepare for scenarios:
They document their contributions in ways that survive strategy pivots
They build relationships across teams so their value isn’t tied to one initiative
They develop skills that matter regardless of which direction the company goes
I’m not saying go rogue. Going completely off-strategy is high-risk, and if it fails, you’re on your own. But blindly following strategy without building your own narrative is betting your career on your company’s ability to predict the future. How’s that been working out?
The sweet spot: do the work the strategy demands, but frame your contributions in terms of timeless capabilities, not temporary initiatives. Don’t say “I worked on Project Phoenix.” Say “I reduced deployment time by 40% and built a framework three teams now use.” When Phoenix gets canceled, you’re still valuable.
The Promotion Math
Here’s the thing about promotions that creates so much confusion: being ready to do the job is necessary but not sufficient.
You’ve checked all the boxes. You have the capabilities. Your leader agrees you’re ready. Great. Now you need the company to have a business need for someone at that level. And here’s where it gets messy.
Different companies handle this differently, but here’s the reality most won’t tell you: there is no separate budget for internal promotions versus external hires. The company has needs. They fill them. Sometimes by promoting you, sometimes by hiring someone from outside, often by doing nothing because they’ve decided that role isn’t actually necessary right now.
This creates three scenarios:
Scenario 1: The Layup - Business need exists, you’re ready, timing aligns. You get promoted. This is what everyone assumes is normal. It’s actually rare.
Scenario 2: The Wait - You’re ready, but there’s no business need for that role right now. You wait. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe forever. This is the most common scenario and the one that creates the most frustration. Your “readiness” has an expiration date. If you wait too long, the market passes you by.
Scenario 3: The Hire-Over - Business need exists, you’re almost ready, but they hire externally because they need someone who can do the job on day one. This one stings the most. You’ve been investing in progression, and they gave the role to someone else.
What’s your move? Set a deadline. Not publicly, but privately with yourself. “If I’m not promoted by X date, I start interviewing.” The company doesn’t owe you a promotion just because you’re ready, and you don’t owe them infinite patience. This is a transaction, not a marriage.
The Leader’s Perspective
Let me tell you what happens in those calibration meetings where your raise gets decided:
Your leader argues for you. “They delivered X, Y, and Z. They should get 8%.” Then someone asks: “What about the production incident?” or “How does that compare to what Sarah delivered?” or “Can we really justify 8% when they’ve only been at level for 18 months?”
Your leader needs ammunition for these conversations. Specific wins. Measurable impact. Evidence that your contributions go beyond “does their job.”
Here’s what makes it easy for us to fight for you:
You’ve made our job easier. You’ve kept that win list updated, you’ve documented your wins, you’ve given us the narrative we can use
You’ve solved problems we didn’t ask you to solve. Shows initiative and business understanding
Other people have mentioned you positively. When your leader’s peer says “your engineer helped us out last week,” that’s gold
You’ve made someone else’s life better. Mentoring, unblocking others, improving team processes
Here’s what makes it hard:
We’re surprised by your expectations. If you think you deserve 10% and we think you deserve 3%, someone failed at communication
Your wins are invisible. You did great work that nobody knows about
You’ve created extra work for us. Drama with teammates, quality issues, needing lots of hand-holding
Most engineers think leaders are gatekeepers trying to minimize raises. The opposite is true. Our success is tied to your success. When you win, we win. But we need you to play the game.
Here’s what I see at the organizational level that even most managers miss: merit budgets get allocated top-down based on each org’s perceived strategic importance. Your brilliance matters less than whether your VP successfully argued that your entire org deserves a bigger slice of the pie. This is why sometimes entire teams get 2-3% across the board while another team averages 8-10%. It’s not about individual performance at that point. Your leader can fight perfectly for you and still lose because the budget for your entire org was constrained before the conversation even started.
This doesn’t mean your work doesn’t matter. It means you need to understand the layers of the game. Individual performance gets you considered. Your leader’s advocacy gets you prioritized within your team. But your org’s strategic positioning determines the size of the pool you’re all fighting over.
The Golden Ticket
Here’s the synthesis that most people miss: align your personal career strategy with the company strategy and execute visibly.
This means:
Every quarter, identify 1-2 company priorities that matter and figure out how to contribute to them in a way that stretches your skills toward your next role
Every month, make sure your leader knows about at least one significant thing you accomplished (keep that win list updated in your shared notes)
Every year, assess whether this company can give you what you need within your timeline, and be honest with yourself about the answer
The engineers who consistently get good raises and timely promotions aren’t necessarily the most technically skilled. They’re the ones who understand that merit increases are decided by humans in rooms with competing priorities and limited budgets.
Give your leader the ammunition. Make the right work visible. Set deadlines.
And if all else fails, remember: the market is a scoreboard too, and sometimes the best raise is the one you negotiate at a new company.
I’m not claiming this system is good. It’s not. Visibility shouldn’t matter as much as it does. Timing shouldn’t be such a huge factor in promotion. The best engineers should get promoted based on capability, not whether the budget aligned with their readiness. But this is the game as it exists today at most companies. You can play it while advocating for something better. Understanding the rules doesn’t mean you endorse them.
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