When There’s Nowhere to Climb – Understanding the Hidden Costs of Rigid Career Ladders

If you’re managing engineers in a flat or rigid org, you already know: the real challenge isn’t technical, it’s motivational. Growth conversations stall. Promotions are scarce. And your best people start quietly asking: what now? Let's reflect on what it feels like to manage in that space and the structural weight we’re up against.

TL;DR

• Career ladders are great but not enough as they rarely reflect the complexity of actual growth.

• Engineers often stagnate at one level for years waiting on business decisions they can’t influence.

• Managers are left to bridge the gap without proper tools or support.

• HR and leadership must recognize the emotional and business cost of career stagnation.

• Solving these points starts by acknowledging the system’s limitations.

Career Ladders Don’t Go Far Enough

On paper, most companies have a career framework. It looks tidy: junior, mid, senior, staff or pivot to management. There's a description, a skill matrix, and sometimes even a progression rubric. But the lived experience hits hard.

An engineer once asked me: "Am I just waiting for someone to quit so I can move up?"

And honestly? Sometimes… yes.

The org may say “We promote based on merit,” but in reality? No open headcount, no movement. Promotions often happen once a year, if at all. And even then, it’s a mix of budget approvals, visibility battles, and backchannel conversations. That’s not growth. That’s bureaucracy.

What's worse, these ladders are often too rigid to reflect how growth actually works. Engineers may deepen skills, expand influence, and evolve in their thinking all while technically “stuck” at the same level.

The Emotional Cost of Staying Still

Let’s talk about what it feels like to be an engineer in this situation:

You’ve mastered your current responsibilities. You’re mentoring others. You’re trusted by your peers. And still, nothing changes. That sense of momentum that once fueled you? It starts to flicker.

To encourage my reports to reflect on their value, I turned to an exercise from the Squiggly Career. I asked them to write 20 things they’re great at in 60 seconds. Most of them had trouble getting past five. But with some extra time and providing a few objective suggestions, we got to 20. You could see their posture change.

That moment, watching someone remember their own value, was beautiful. But it also highlighted how invisible they felt. If you don’t give people a story about their growth, they’ll assume they’re not growing.

This is where attrition begins. It is not with a resignation letter, but with a quiet sense of “maybe I’ve gone as far as I can here.”

Managers Are Left Holding the Emotional Weight

In these structures, managers are often left to bridge the gap between aspiration and reality.

You’re having career conversations without being able to offer promotions. You’re coaching toward goals that aren’t recognized by the system. You’re trying to retain people without having actual levers of reward or advancement. So we try to invent our own forms of recognition. Internal roles. Informal titles. Project ownership. Peer feedback. But when the systematic yearly reviews arrive, none of that makes up for the deep structural inflexibility we’re working around. This gets especially frustrating when the broader company culture is not aware and supportive, and such team-based efforts get stomped on with changing leadership.

And HR? This Isn’t Just a Manager Problem

This part’s for HR, compensation committees, and org designers.

Rigid title structures and slow promotion cycles are not just “policy”, they are retention liabilities.

Recruiting costs time. Onboarding drains velocity. And your knowledge? It walks out the door.

And that’s if you’re lucky. Often, you also lose culture, team momentum, and morale. Your senior engineers are the connective tissue of your team. If they go, it’s not just a backfill, it’s a rebuild.

Yes, career frameworks matter. But when they become a cage instead of a guide, they do more harm than good. The cost of inaction is higher than you think.

There IS a Way Forward

If flat structure, slow promotions, no open titles is your reality, there is still a way to help people grow.

You can build horizontal growth paths: meaningful, visible, identity-driven development opportunities that work within the system, even if the system won’t flex. I wrote a tactical guide for managers on how to build those paths step-by-step, with real examples. If you're interested, hop over to A Manager's Guide to Designing Horizontal Career Paths for some practical tips.

Final Thoughts

When there’s nowhere to climb, we have to stop pretending the ladder will save us.

Managers, you’re not imagining the tension you feel. HR, these aren’t edge cases. This is the lived reality of your strongest people. And ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, it just means you’ll hear about it when it’s too late.

Let’s stop seeing career growth as something that only happens “up.” Growing at scale is not built for that.