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The audience and purpose of this article is unclear. Is this meant for engineers who don't work at Square, for the purpose of recruiting? Or for engineers who

The audience and purpose of this article is unclear. Is this meant for engineers who don't work at Square, for the purpose of recruiting? Or for engineers who already work at Square, for the purpose of justification, i.e. an internal newsletter? The headline matches the former, but the content seems bent towards the latter. For one, the overly-long preamble reads like a page in a corporate handbook, laced with insecurity. > Our levels don’t line up perfectly with those of other companies ... You likely can’t accurately compare level numbers or titles directly between companies, even with tools that provide mappings between companies. Similarly, most of the "principles" presented are either common-place: > Levels build on each other: Each level implicitly includes all criteria and responsibilities of prior levels. Or deceptive: > Promotions don’t unlock new responsibilities; the new responsibilities and increased scope come first and then we recognize it with a promotion. Or are a lot of nice-sounding words, too incoherent to disagree with. As someone who's had to suffer through career frameworks championed by company-lifers straight from college, I don't think this article won’t quite attract the best and brightest.

svachalek 7y ago
The level thing reads like some kind of horrible gaslighting, but to be fair it's mostly true across all companies. Being a senior engineer in a company that has QA and/or project managers is a very different role than in one that doesn't, for example, and this is a dimension orthogonal to "level". The bit on promotions is fairly commonplace and sound, about the only real solution I've seen to the Peter Principle. This doesn't strike me as a particularly exciting document but it doesn't seem terrible either. I like that there are a variety of ways companies handle this sort of thing, and that companies are being more open about it. It really helps potential employees sort out where they want to be.
- hitekker 7y ago
  You're right this document neither terrible nor exciting, but I'd disagree that this document is "open". As others commented on the falsehood inherent to "Two Tracks / Becoming a manager is not a promotion", a blurred transparency tends to be more deceiving than an obvious opacity. Or rather, being bull-shitted can be worse than being told nothing at all.

svachalek 7y ago

The level thing reads like some kind of horrible gaslighting, but to be fair it's mostly true across all companies. Being a senior engineer in a company that has QA and/or project managers is a very different role than in one that doesn't, for example, and this is a dimension orthogonal to "level". The bit on promotions is fairly commonplace and sound, about the only real solution I've seen to the Peter Principle. This doesn't strike me as a particularly exciting document but it doesn't seem terrible either. I like that there are a variety of ways companies handle this sort of thing, and that companies are being more open about it. It really helps potential employees sort out where they want to be.

hitekker 7y ago
You're right this document neither terrible nor exciting, but I'd disagree that this document is "open". As others commented on the falsehood inherent to "Two Tracks / Becoming a manager is not a promotion", a blurred transparency tends to be more deceiving than an obvious opacity. Or rather, being bull-shitted can be worse than being told nothing at all.