A weird thought occurred to me this afternoon, mostly because it is irrelevant to me right now.
In some performance review systems you're up for a promotion on a relatively rare basis, and the way that decision is made by management factors in a lot of non-performance gunk. For instance, let's say this is a big company and you can internally transfer around.
- If you're new to the team they probably won't give you one of their precious promotions, they'd rather reward those who have been there and stuck with them for a while.
- If you've recently been promoted, naturally you're much lower priority.
Along the same lines, when giving out the prizes they're more likely to reward those that have been there for the entire review period, rather than someone who joined in the middle. Plus the rewards tend to be worse in the review cycle right after a promotion.
Thus, the absolute best time to internally transfer is immediately after a promotion, preferably at the beginning of the review cycle. The two major reasons why you wouldn't be promoted are both true (recent promotion and recent team move), and both being true is unlikely to cause the downtime to last longer (the recent promotion probably puts off the next review longer than the new team does, but maybe not).
The two major reasons why your next review would be less rewarding are also true (just been promoted, new team).
The reason why teams don't give promotions to new team members is to reward people for staying with the team, but the side effect is that the best reason to leave a group is because they did give you one. So the promotion is a way to keep people at a company, but not with a specific group at the company.
This assumes, naturally, that you have interest in leaving the current team. Promotions are rare opportunities to use an internal transfer to your advantage, in other situations it is pretty much a bad deal. Probably a better idea to do an external transfer, and then come back later with broader experience and at current market rates.
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