Promotion is a touchy thing. As a manager, promoting your top performers seems like a no brainer, but sometimes if an employee is above a certain quality bar that warrants a promotion (as you mentioned), even though there are others who probably deserve it more, you sometimes have to spread the love around. Knowing who to promote (and who not to promote, knowing they'll still stick around) is a skill.
So I don't think that the promotion was necessarily done just because those employees are from underrepresented groups and just to hit some company diversity/equality metric, but I wouldn't know for sure
Promotion is never a touchy thing when you set clear expectations for a persons progression - one that is measurable and comparable to their peers.
The individuals then know, directly or indirectly, if they are on the right path, and which one of their peers is ahead or behind. The incentive there is for them to either up their game, or stay where they are.
The only fear there is that the system / process can be gamed; but one almost always never picks the lesser of the two qualified individuals - you risk loosing the more qualified individual and the team no longer has any faith in the “system” and they too will loose respect and move on.
Perhaps I may not have the experience you do, but it’s something I would never stand for - I would love to hear examples of when and such a scenario would play out though as it’s something I may encounter at some point in my career.
All the systems I’ve ever encountered are horrible: lines of code, hours spent coding, issues closed, bugs created, and so on.
Not all lines of code are equal. Not all hours are equally productive. Not all issues are equally difficult. Not all bugs are equally costly. And so on.
“Impact” sounds like a qualitative metric, not a quantitative one, which is fine of course. But the parent asserted that promotions should be based on measurable data, which I’m still unconvinced is practical to do well.
Could everyone working at a company with more that 30,000 where there's clear measurable and transparent progression expectations and no-one has ever grumbled about not getting promoted please stand up.
doesn't work when like when I worked for BT in the UK where in systems engineering (67k head count division) there where only 18 or so promotions from level 1 engineer to level 2 engineer every 18 months or so.
you might have a lot of applicants of which maybe 600 got onto the short list (my boss commented if you get on the short list they know you can do the job)
So I don't think that the promotion was necessarily done just because those employees are from underrepresented groups and just to hit some company diversity/equality metric, but I wouldn't know for sure