Graduates choose employers carefully and are assigned managers at random. The second decision affects the first three years more than the first does.
Assignment of work happens locally
A company's stated development program sets a framework. What a person actually does each week is chosen by one supervisor with substantial discretion and limited oversight.
That discretion covers which projects a new employee joins, whether she presents her own work, who she meets and whether her name is attached to what she produced.
Two people hired into the same title on the same day can therefore accumulate very different records, and the difference is invisible in any comparison of employers.
Visibility compounds faster than skill
Promotion decisions are made in rooms where a candidate is not present, on the basis of what others can say about her work from memory.
A manager who routes credit accurately builds that memory in other people. A manager who presents team output as his own leaves nothing for anyone else to recall.
Because each promotion improves access to the next round of visible work, an early difference in credit does not stay proportional; it widens across the following years.
Feedback quality is the second variable
Specific, timely feedback allows correction. Vague reassurance followed by a poor review at the annual cycle removes any opportunity to have addressed the problem.
Research on workplace feedback consistently finds that women receive vaguer commentary on average, which makes the individual manager's habits more consequential rather than less.
The signals are readable before accepting an offer
Candidates can ask where the last two people in the role went next, how often the team meets one to one, and who presents work to senior leadership.
The answers are concrete and hard to fake. A manager who cannot name where predecessors went is describing a team where nobody has advanced from it recently.
Leaving a bad manager is not leaving a career
Internal transfers exist in most large organizations and usually require a period in the role and a conversation that is awkward rather than prohibited.
Employees frequently overestimate the reputational cost of a transfer and underestimate the cost of two additional years without visible work or usable feedback.
Employment terms, notice expectations and any internal transfer restrictions vary by employer and by state, so the employee handbook and a human resources representative are the practical starting point.