Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors:

As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.

There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.

Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.

> Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails.

> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit

Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."

Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.

Another thing I tell people is if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Many people do a job well and make themselves too critical in a certain position thinking it will make their job more secure. First, the way layoffs typically work, they are likely not more secure. And second, it makes promotions much harder.

> create a new promotion-like role

I do this for people on my team when I can.

Another aspect of being promoted: many of us see what the next level has to do/is doing and isn’t interested in doing that. I’ve seen people get promoted and then immediately implode because N+1 started involving lots of politics that they couldn’t or didn’t want to handle. Even senior IC roles get more and more exposed to non-technical and organizational issues.

In a hierarchical organization, there's a lot less room at the top: There's only one CEO, only a handful of executive positions, ect. Not everyone needs to be a leader to be successful.