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Arpit Bhayani Blogs
001 Ai Topological Sort

051-promotions-are-proactive-not-reactive

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You Won't Be Promoted Unless You Ask

Source: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/promotions-are-proactive-not-reactive Date: 2025-05-16

Chasing promotions is important, but it shouldn't consume all your energy. Even if it's your main focus, that's okay. Just make sure you're also growing, doing work you're proud of, and finding peace in what you do.

It is important that your work and impact are recognized and that you are rewarded for your contributions. But how do you make that happen?

Don’t wait for your manager to bring it up; you should start the conversation. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for a promotion; many people feel shy about it, but you don’t need to. Pitch your case for a promotion and see how your manager responds.

Two cases - either your manager says you’re ready, or they will say you are not. If you are ready, that’s great! Work with your manager to formalize the promotion packet and ensure everything is aligned for the upcoming cycle.

001-ai-topological-sort.md
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002 Temporal Primer
002-temporal-primer.md
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003 Rag Production
003-rag-production.md
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004 Structure Of Llm Chat
004-structure-of-llm-chat.md
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005 How Llms Work
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006 Monolith Is Distributed System
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007 Defensive Databases
007-defensive-databases.md
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008 Bm25
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009 Join Algorithms
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010 Venting At Work
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011 Half Life
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012 Multi Paxos
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013 Mysql Replication Internals
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014 Bloom Filters
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015 Clock Sync Nightmare
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016 Kafka Partitions
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017 Product Quantization
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018 Qkv Matrices
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019 Deleted Production
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020 How Llm Inference Works
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021 Blocking Queues
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022 Heartbeats In Distributed Systems
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023 Cassandra Writes
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024 Redis Replication
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025 Arrogant People At Work
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026 Cdn Content Replication
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027 Cant Fix Everything Day One
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028 Emotions At Work
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029 Grpc Http2
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030 Meetings With No Agenda Are A Waste Of Time
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031 Growth Is Not About Doing Everything
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032 Career Longevity Vs Job Hopping
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033 Stay Relevant At Higher Salary Levels
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034 Why Consensus
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035 Database Deadlocks
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036 Cpu Cache Locality
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037 Eventual Consistency
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038 Dns Udp Tcp
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039 Masters
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040 Empathy Makes Great Engineers Unstoppable
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041 Good Mentors Build People
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042 Always Have Back Burner Projects
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043 Before You Push Back Know What Youre Standing On
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044 Be The One They Can Count On
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045 How Much People Bet On You
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046 How To Get Leadership To Say Yes To Your Project
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047 Dont Let Your Best Ideas Die In Silence
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048 Be Someone Others Want To Work With
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049 Dont Fall For Xy Problem Ask Right Questions
049-dont-fall-for-xy-problem-ask-right-questions.md
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050 Biggest Lie Startups Tell Engineers
050-biggest-lie-startups-tell-engineers.md
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051 Promotions Are Proactive Not Reactive
051-promotions-are-proactive-not-reactive.md
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052 Not Enough To Be Right Learn To Be Heard
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053 No One Ships Alone
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054 Not Every Mistake Needs A Correction
054-not-every-mistake-needs-a-correction.md
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055 Build Influence At Work
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056 Your Soft Skills Arent Soft At All
056-your-soft-skills-arent-soft-at-all.md
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057 Experience Before Forming Opinion
057-experience-before-forming-opinion.md
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058 Curiosity And High Bias For Action
058-curiosity-and-high-bias-for-action.md
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059 Worklog
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060 Mistakes And Growth
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061 Own It Instead Of Sweeping It Aside
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062 Dont Wait Step Up
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063 Temporary Fix Is Permanent
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064 Interview Bias And What Sets You Apart
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065 Saying This Isnt My Problem Is A Problem
065-saying-this-isnt-my-problem-is-a-problem.md
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066 Okr
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067 Miscommunication
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068 When In Doubt Code It Out
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069 Follow Up Without Annoying People
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070 Lead Projects That Land
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071 Abstract Thinking Skill Next Decade
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072 We Engineers Suck At Task Estimation
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073 Shiny Object Syndrome In Tech
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074 3p
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075 Leverage The Equilibrium
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076 On Demand Container Loading In Aws Lambda
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077 Sql Has Problems We Can Fix Them Pipe Syntax In Sql
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078 Nanolog A Nanosecond Scale Logging System
078-nanolog-a-nanosecond-scale-logging-system.md
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079 Best Resource Is Mythical
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080 Wtf The Who To Follow Service At Twitter
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081 Know A Lot
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082 Out Of Syllabus
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083 Negotiate The Offer
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084 Never Bad Mouth Your Ex Exployer
084-never-bad-mouth-your-ex-exployer.md
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085 Culture Fit
085-culture-fit.md
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086 Quantification In Resume
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087 Hiring Is Unfair
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088 Questions For Interviewers
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089 Collaboration Communication
089-collaboration-communication.md
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090 Out Of Vicious Interview Cycle
090-out-of-vicious-interview-cycle.md
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091 Pitch Projects Not Ideas
091-pitch-projects-not-ideas.md
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092 Read Design Docs
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093 Read Rca Docs
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094 Start Generalist
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095 Do Not Rely On Summaries
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096 Structure Your Design Interviews
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097 Title Inflation
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098 Find Your Own Project
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099 Six Pointers To Crack Coding And Design Interviews
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100 Keep Yourself Unblocked
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101 Genetic Knapsack
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102 Pseudorandom Number Generation Lfsr
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103 How Indexes Work On Partitioned And Sharded Data
103-how-indexes-work-on-partitioned-and-sharded-data.md
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104 Some Data Partitioning Strategies For Distributed Data Stores
104-some-data-partitioning-strategies-for-distributed-data-stores.md
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105 Data Partitioning
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106 Leaderless Replication
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107 Conflict Resolution
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108 Conflict Detection
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109 Multi Master Replication
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110 Monotonic Reads
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111 Read Your Write Consistency
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112 Handling Outages Master Replica
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113 Replication Formats
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114 Replication Strategies
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115 Master Replica Replication
115-master-replica-replication.md
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116 Durability
116-durability.md
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117 Isolation
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118 Atomicity
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119 Consistency
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120 Architectures In Distributed Systems
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121 Mistaken Beliefs Of Distributed Systems
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122 Fork Bomb
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123 Chained Operators Python
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124 Taxonomy On Sql
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125 The Weird Walrus
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126 Fully Persistent Arrays
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127 Persistent Data Structures Introduction
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128 Constant Folding Python
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129 String Interning Python
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130 Recursion Visualizer Python
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131 Flajolet Martin
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132 2q Cache
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133 Israeli Queues
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134 1d Terrain
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135 Jaccard Minhash
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136 Ts Smoothing
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137 Lfu
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138 Morris Counter
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139 Slowsort
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140 Bitcask
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141 Phi Accrual
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142 10x Engineer
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143 Decipher Repeated Key Xor
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144 Decipher Single Xor
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145 Python Iterable Integers
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146 Inheritance C
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147 Rum
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148 Consistent Hashing
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149 Python Caches Integers
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150 Fractional Cascading
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151 Copy On Write
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152 Midpoint Insertion Caching Strategy
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153 Fsm Python
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154 Bayesian Average
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155 Sliding Window Ratelimiter
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156 Idf
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157 Better Programmer
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158 Python Prompts
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159 Rule 30 Cellular Automata
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160 Function Overloading
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161 Isolation Forest
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162 Image Steganography
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163 Long Integers Python
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164 I Changed My Python
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165 Benchmark And Compare Pagination Approach In Mongodb
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166 Mongodb Cursor Skip Is Slow
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167 Fast And Efficient Pagination In Mongodb
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168 Making Http Requests Using Netcat
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If you are not ready, work with your manager to create an actionable plan. This plan might take a few quarters to a few years to complete, and that’s okay. Think of it as a checklist. Once you’ve completed it, pitch again.

Now, if you’ve done everything that was asked and you are still told “not yet,” the possible paths you have are

  1. wait, it could be a genuine case where roles aren’t open
  2. have a firm conversation up the ladder and pitch again
  3. look for growth opportunities in adjacent teams
  4. begin looking for new roles elsewhere, and make a responsible transition when the time is right.

There is no absolute right or wrong here. The only wrong move is reacting with harsh or emotional language to express disappointment. Stay professional, always.

Chasing promotions is important, but it shouldn’t consume all your energy. Even if it does, that’s okay, because you own your career. Just make sure you are also growing, doing work you are proud of, and finding peace in what you do.