8 ms·

Career levels, designation, momentum, etc. (2018)

66 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

kgin 6y ago
I needed a reminder to never work at a large company again, so this was very helpful.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  Felt exactly the same way.
spIrr 6y ago
If you like this, I can only recommend Will Larson’s (the author of the blog post) book called “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” published by Stripe Press. It a collection of very tactical things of how to think about engineering careers and managing others.
- kyshoc 6y ago
  +1. I can also recommend his new book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track”.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I wrote up a post about some inherent, fundamental contradictions in leveling / salary band approaches to structured career development. I think it’s under-appreciated that these systems are so inherently flawed, especially regarding meritocracy. https://managingml.substack.com/p/a-cap-theorem-for-career-development https://managingml.substack.com/p/a-cap-theorem-for-career-d...
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  I've been working as a contractor for more than the past 10 years, and I'd say salary banding is one of the primary reasons I've been able to remain employed 100% of the time. A big company will be able to get some portion of the labor it requires within the bands they set out. But the more in demand the skills they're seeking are, the less likely they'll be able to convince people to work for the band rates they've set. When they encounter those situations, their only options are to hire contractors at even more expensive rates, or to not get the work done. There's plenty of reasons why contingent labor might appeal to a company, but hilariously inefficient salary banding practices seems like one of the more common ones to me.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Or you just pay certain distinguished people well outside the typical band (or, equivalently, create a “track of one”, both of which are a version of CP). Bands are not the problem. Mindless, extremely rigid adherence to bands is the problem.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      That would be one approach, but I think most big organisations would presume that it would simply spiral out of control, and the bands will end up achieving nothing. From a management perspective, if you’re trying to resource a team or a project, hiring a contractor at a high contracting rate typically works out to be the path of least resistance.
- vsskanth 6y ago
  Good article. But what you say might make sense in CA, but employers outside CA use non-compete agreements to avoid this type of disruption. Eventually, salary bands and performance reviews just becomes an excuse to underpay employees since they don't have to compete for your talent anymore.
- aahortwwy 6y ago
  Great post, thanks for sharing it.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  I don't really buy your conclusions here. Speaking about Google specifically, the bands exist, but are wide enough that you can have, call it ~40% variance within a level (and actually I think this increases as you go up the ladder, so by staff it's maybe even more), and that's before things like spot bonuses (which granted aren't usually huge but can be nontrivial in aggregate). I guess in some sense you can argue that that is simply a relaxation of A, and that those companies don't have aligned compensation, but I don't think that's true. There's also the problem that, especially as you move further away from direct P&L, calculating value is really difficult. I work in infrastructure and engineering productivity. When I'm lucky, I can get an engineer-hours-saved metric, but most of the time I can't get that directly, and my work reduces system complexity, which pays off eventually in time saved or outages avoided. Systems that try to sort of directly reward performance fail for a lot of cases where that's fuzzy. It also, speaking personally, hasn't been a huge issue, and I don't see the slow-growth that the original article talks about. My compensation has been increasing on a linearish trajectory fairly quickly, and that doesn't appear to be slowing down yet. My growth (both career and compensation) is faster than many, though not all, of my peers. I know people who took 2x as long as me to get promoted, and I know people who did it 2x faster (and that's true both from 3->4 and 4->5, we'll see for 6). That doesn't sound particularly tenure based.
  - jameshush 6y ago
    I'd recommend prioritizing getting those numbers. Making the time to setup the measuring/monitoring is a bit of a pain but it's worth it. I worked in the same vertical (infra/"DevOps"/engineering productivity) before I shifted to becoming a people manager. Here's some of the things we're setting up now to measure this: - Using something like https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream to measure number of deploys per week, build times across pull requests, length of time it takes a pull request merged across the entire team, etc. - If you want to get fancier, setting up simple tracking to measure how much time running "npm install" takes across all engineers on their local machines. This could get logged in something like Datadog/Grafana/whatever graphing solution you want. - Zoom out even further. Are releases being slowed down by other teams by accident? E.g. we had a feature delayed a week by accident because the marketing team didn't know a feature was finished, in production, but behind a flag waiting for them to write marketing copy. We're currently setting up a way to track "features in production but behind a flag" in Jira better and feed that "lag time" data into our overall deployment picture. The idea being, for every task you're executing to "improve developer productivity" you should have a hypothesis with about how much time it'll save the team. If you can't get that right away, I'd move on to a task that has a better measure to it and knock that out first. If you completely run out of tasks and measurements, that's when you can take bigger bets on tasks that have more fuzzy measurements next to them. In my experience the work here never dries up though.
vsskanth 6y ago
In the long term, is it worth it to participate in performance review theater and career progression games, instead of marketing yourself and getting a nice raise or promotion by switching companies every 3-5 years ? I know you would stall at some point, but at least it wont feel soul crushing until then.
- bin_bash 6y ago
  In FAANG it’s usually very hard to come in at the higher levels (6+). You almost certainly won’t be offered a higher level than what you had at your previous company. If so, it’s almost certainly another FAANG and you have a damn good reason why you should be at a higher level than you currently have. Even if you managed to get in at a high level it can be very hard to actually operate at a higher level when you’re new at the company. A lot of people fail to ramp up.
  - vsskanth 6y ago
    does it have to be FANG though ? Smaller companies might be willing to give you more responsibility, if that's your goal.
    - bin_bash 6y ago
      Smaller companies don't have as developed an IC track. If they have levels you can advance to, great, but eventually if you want to keep moving up in income you'll have to join a FAANG or switch to an EM track. To be clear, there are definitely a handful of firms that have levels similar to what can be found in FAANG but not many. Also, I should say "GAFAM" since Netflix doesn't even have levels—but that's not as well known a term.
  - mssundaram 6y ago
    Well, I only have 3 data points, but so far every job I've gotten I've moved up a level at series A through C level start ups.
    - 6y ago
bern4444 6y ago
I work at a large video streaming company. I put in my 2 weeks notice last week. A coworker put theirs in a few weeks before me and another a few days after me. All of us are frustrated about the company's (lack of) leveling system, poor compensation, and overall lack of leadership on this and many other issues. Many other engineers are too and some more will likely leave over the next couple of months. A new banding system has been in the works since I started 3 years ago. Companies need to have this figured out and operate in a clear predictable way to avoid exoduses like what I'm seeing (our engineerinng division has had 5-6 people leave since the start of the year including us 3). If you're in a leadership or executive role, your priority should be to create a space that allows for individuals to move up and progress in their careers. Let your team - engineers, designers, managers etc - focus on building the product. You need to build a business.
- splittingTimes 6y ago
  I totally hear you. However, i do not see a clear solution to the conundrum that many non-unicorn, non-VC funded small/midsize companies face: Your company is profitable but has slow organic growth in revenue/profit (single or low double digits). Everybody has more work on the table than is actually doable. To keep up with demand, you can hire sporadically one person in this department one in that... If you're numbers are good, maybe you can hire in the single digits per year. Since salaries (especially in the tech sector) are rising much faster per year than your growth or inflation for that matter, you must pay much more to the new hires. This creates a salary gap in your team and leaves also less money for yearly salary adjustments for existing employees. Also since I hire only few per year, i cannot offer a meaningful Management career path, nor can i promote every Dev to a architect or principal. After all, to keep the business running, I need devs that do Dev work. In the current artificially inflated tech market (thanks to easy money), if I job hop i can increase my pay by 20%. However which normal company is able to regularly increase the salaries of all their employees by that percentage and grow head count? Impossible.
  - mavelikara 6y ago
    > Your company is profitable but has slow organic growth in revenue/profit (single or low double digits). > Since salaries (especially in the tech sector) are rising much faster per year than your growth or inflation for that matter, you must pay much more to the new hires. > In the current artificially inflated tech market (thanks to easy money), By some accident engineers have offered their time to this business which is unable to put their efforts to good economic use, and hence unable to pay market-competitive salaries. The management at this firm needs to think hard if they really need expensive skills as inputs, and if they do, why are the returns so meager.
nine_zeros 6y ago
After smashing through OKRs and projects, my manager is evasive on a promotion. Empirical evidence shows how my work frees up others and how libraries I've created have saved time in future projects. Empirical evidence also shows how my work ultimately makes it to production and how I've been at the forefront of crossteam coordination to get projects delivered 100%. Something even other seniors are struggling with on our team. It's a genuine problem. Peer managers are happy working with me. Peer engineer reviews are good. Director is happy. But my own manager just evades this conversation by saying bull such as "oh, but those projects had a senior on them" or "oh, that's just crud apis". And this is after 9 months of "working towards the next level". He now says that he wants me to work on another challenging project and prove that I can deliver it timely. I feel like he's bullshitting me and playing with my life. I am very demotivated from trying hard or doing anything for this manager. I keep asking myself, "What's the goddamn point? He's going to bullshit me anyway again". Has someone else experienced this? Is this normal? I prefer not jumping ship but this kind of evasive bullshittery is affecting my mental health.
- nullsense 6y ago
  You're playing his game and he's winning.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Set up a 1-on-1 with the director to discuss your managers behavior? Not something to be done lightly, if you are already planning to jump ship it can hardly hurt.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Don’t do this. You will just expose the wound and ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company (going above chain of command). Find another job.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      Well, what I think you're getting at is this kind of a tactic is inherently escalatory. But the truth is, if you want to get what you want, you need to be willing to play hardball and apply leverage. Of course, the most important part of that is BATNA, which coincides with what you said -- find another job. Where I disagree with you is that it will ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company. Going "above the chain of command" is actually pretty normal and institutionalized process at functional companies -- it's called the skip-level meeting, and it's a deliberate check/feedback mechanism on line managers over-extending on managing upwards rather than downwards. I'd actually argue the opposite point, which is that organizations that fail to properly implement skip-level meetings are missing out on an important mechanism which ensures the chain of command is performant and rooting out structural rot. As a spot check, my observations on every org I've worked at basically vindicate this.
joschmo 6y ago
One of the few things I appreciated about finance was how clear the hierarchy system was. 3 years as an analyst, 3 as an associate, 3 as a VP, 3-5 as a director with promotion to managing director based on hitting clearly defined fee generation markers, and then an eat-what-you-kill model as a managing director with a clear % take rate on what you brought in. And banks have accelerated the early years path to compete with tech and private equity by including accelerated 2-year paths at the analyst and associate levels for top bucket performers. Now these banks are still hemorrhaging junior talent now more than ever, but that's probably more of a function of lifestyle (80-100 weeks for your first 5-6 years before things start settling down). The review cycles are generally okay (not good by any stretch) but manage to capture whether or not someone's impact is outsized and worth accelerating. So a great job of finding the 8-10/10s but pretty poor at delineating between 4-7s. Not possible to use that model in engineering organizations (at least the ones I've seen) because there isn't an apprenticeship model in tech as in finance so it is harder to promote a 7/10 performer every 3 years reliably because they may not be capable of doing the next job due to specialization and less linear skillset building.

66 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

kgin 6y ago

I needed a reminder to never work at a large company again, so this was very helpful.

darkteflon 6y ago
Felt exactly the same way.

spIrr 6y ago

If you like this, I can only recommend Will Larson’s (the author of the blog post) book called “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” published by Stripe Press. It a collection of very tactical things of how to think about engineering careers and managing others.

kyshoc 6y ago
+1. I can also recommend his new book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track”.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I wrote up a post about some inherent, fundamental contradictions in leveling / salary band approaches to structured career development. I think it’s under-appreciated that these systems are so inherently flawed, especially regarding meritocracy. https://managingml.substack.com/p/a-cap-theorem-for-career-development https://managingml.substack.com/p/a-cap-theorem-for-career-d...

AmericanChopper 6y ago
I've been working as a contractor for more than the past 10 years, and I'd say salary banding is one of the primary reasons I've been able to remain employed 100% of the time. A big company will be able to get some portion of the labor it requires within the bands they set out. But the more in demand the skills they're seeking are, the less likely they'll be able to convince people to work for the band rates they've set. When they encounter those situations, their only options are to hire contractors at even more expensive rates, or to not get the work done. There's plenty of reasons why contingent labor might appeal to a company, but hilariously inefficient salary banding practices seems like one of the more common ones to me.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Or you just pay certain distinguished people well outside the typical band (or, equivalently, create a “track of one”, both of which are a version of CP). Bands are not the problem. Mindless, extremely rigid adherence to bands is the problem.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    That would be one approach, but I think most big organisations would presume that it would simply spiral out of control, and the bands will end up achieving nothing. From a management perspective, if you’re trying to resource a team or a project, hiring a contractor at a high contracting rate typically works out to be the path of least resistance.
vsskanth 6y ago
Good article. But what you say might make sense in CA, but employers outside CA use non-compete agreements to avoid this type of disruption. Eventually, salary bands and performance reviews just becomes an excuse to underpay employees since they don't have to compete for your talent anymore.
aahortwwy 6y ago
Great post, thanks for sharing it.
joshuamorton 6y ago
I don't really buy your conclusions here. Speaking about Google specifically, the bands exist, but are wide enough that you can have, call it ~40% variance within a level (and actually I think this increases as you go up the ladder, so by staff it's maybe even more), and that's before things like spot bonuses (which granted aren't usually huge but can be nontrivial in aggregate). I guess in some sense you can argue that that is simply a relaxation of A, and that those companies don't have aligned compensation, but I don't think that's true. There's also the problem that, especially as you move further away from direct P&L, calculating value is really difficult. I work in infrastructure and engineering productivity. When I'm lucky, I can get an engineer-hours-saved metric, but most of the time I can't get that directly, and my work reduces system complexity, which pays off eventually in time saved or outages avoided. Systems that try to sort of directly reward performance fail for a lot of cases where that's fuzzy. It also, speaking personally, hasn't been a huge issue, and I don't see the slow-growth that the original article talks about. My compensation has been increasing on a linearish trajectory fairly quickly, and that doesn't appear to be slowing down yet. My growth (both career and compensation) is faster than many, though not all, of my peers. I know people who took 2x as long as me to get promoted, and I know people who did it 2x faster (and that's true both from 3->4 and 4->5, we'll see for 6). That doesn't sound particularly tenure based.
- jameshush 6y ago
  I'd recommend prioritizing getting those numbers. Making the time to setup the measuring/monitoring is a bit of a pain but it's worth it. I worked in the same vertical (infra/"DevOps"/engineering productivity) before I shifted to becoming a people manager. Here's some of the things we're setting up now to measure this: - Using something like https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream to measure number of deploys per week, build times across pull requests, length of time it takes a pull request merged across the entire team, etc. - If you want to get fancier, setting up simple tracking to measure how much time running "npm install" takes across all engineers on their local machines. This could get logged in something like Datadog/Grafana/whatever graphing solution you want. - Zoom out even further. Are releases being slowed down by other teams by accident? E.g. we had a feature delayed a week by accident because the marketing team didn't know a feature was finished, in production, but behind a flag waiting for them to write marketing copy. We're currently setting up a way to track "features in production but behind a flag" in Jira better and feed that "lag time" data into our overall deployment picture. The idea being, for every task you're executing to "improve developer productivity" you should have a hypothesis with about how much time it'll save the team. If you can't get that right away, I'd move on to a task that has a better measure to it and knock that out first. If you completely run out of tasks and measurements, that's when you can take bigger bets on tasks that have more fuzzy measurements next to them. In my experience the work here never dries up though.

vsskanth 6y ago

In the long term, is it worth it to participate in performance review theater and career progression games, instead of marketing yourself and getting a nice raise or promotion by switching companies every 3-5 years ? I know you would stall at some point, but at least it wont feel soul crushing until then.

bin_bash 6y ago
In FAANG it’s usually very hard to come in at the higher levels (6+). You almost certainly won’t be offered a higher level than what you had at your previous company. If so, it’s almost certainly another FAANG and you have a damn good reason why you should be at a higher level than you currently have. Even if you managed to get in at a high level it can be very hard to actually operate at a higher level when you’re new at the company. A lot of people fail to ramp up.
- vsskanth 6y ago
  does it have to be FANG though ? Smaller companies might be willing to give you more responsibility, if that's your goal.
  - bin_bash 6y ago
    Smaller companies don't have as developed an IC track. If they have levels you can advance to, great, but eventually if you want to keep moving up in income you'll have to join a FAANG or switch to an EM track. To be clear, there are definitely a handful of firms that have levels similar to what can be found in FAANG but not many. Also, I should say "GAFAM" since Netflix doesn't even have levels—but that's not as well known a term.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  Well, I only have 3 data points, but so far every job I've gotten I've moved up a level at series A through C level start ups.
  - 6y ago

bern4444 6y ago

I work at a large video streaming company. I put in my 2 weeks notice last week. A coworker put theirs in a few weeks before me and another a few days after me. All of us are frustrated about the company's (lack of) leveling system, poor compensation, and overall lack of leadership on this and many other issues. Many other engineers are too and some more will likely leave over the next couple of months. A new banding system has been in the works since I started 3 years ago. Companies need to have this figured out and operate in a clear predictable way to avoid exoduses like what I'm seeing (our engineerinng division has had 5-6 people leave since the start of the year including us 3). If you're in a leadership or executive role, your priority should be to create a space that allows for individuals to move up and progress in their careers. Let your team - engineers, designers, managers etc - focus on building the product. You need to build a business.

splittingTimes 6y ago
I totally hear you. However, i do not see a clear solution to the conundrum that many non-unicorn, non-VC funded small/midsize companies face: Your company is profitable but has slow organic growth in revenue/profit (single or low double digits). Everybody has more work on the table than is actually doable. To keep up with demand, you can hire sporadically one person in this department one in that... If you're numbers are good, maybe you can hire in the single digits per year. Since salaries (especially in the tech sector) are rising much faster per year than your growth or inflation for that matter, you must pay much more to the new hires. This creates a salary gap in your team and leaves also less money for yearly salary adjustments for existing employees. Also since I hire only few per year, i cannot offer a meaningful Management career path, nor can i promote every Dev to a architect or principal. After all, to keep the business running, I need devs that do Dev work. In the current artificially inflated tech market (thanks to easy money), if I job hop i can increase my pay by 20%. However which normal company is able to regularly increase the salaries of all their employees by that percentage and grow head count? Impossible.
- mavelikara 6y ago
  > Your company is profitable but has slow organic growth in revenue/profit (single or low double digits). > Since salaries (especially in the tech sector) are rising much faster per year than your growth or inflation for that matter, you must pay much more to the new hires. > In the current artificially inflated tech market (thanks to easy money), By some accident engineers have offered their time to this business which is unable to put their efforts to good economic use, and hence unable to pay market-competitive salaries. The management at this firm needs to think hard if they really need expensive skills as inputs, and if they do, why are the returns so meager.

nine_zeros 6y ago

After smashing through OKRs and projects, my manager is evasive on a promotion. Empirical evidence shows how my work frees up others and how libraries I've created have saved time in future projects. Empirical evidence also shows how my work ultimately makes it to production and how I've been at the forefront of crossteam coordination to get projects delivered 100%. Something even other seniors are struggling with on our team. It's a genuine problem. Peer managers are happy working with me. Peer engineer reviews are good. Director is happy. But my own manager just evades this conversation by saying bull such as "oh, but those projects had a senior on them" or "oh, that's just crud apis". And this is after 9 months of "working towards the next level". He now says that he wants me to work on another challenging project and prove that I can deliver it timely. I feel like he's bullshitting me and playing with my life. I am very demotivated from trying hard or doing anything for this manager. I keep asking myself, "What's the goddamn point? He's going to bullshit me anyway again". Has someone else experienced this? Is this normal? I prefer not jumping ship but this kind of evasive bullshittery is affecting my mental health.

nullsense 6y ago
You're playing his game and he's winning.
Aeolun 6y ago
Set up a 1-on-1 with the director to discuss your managers behavior? Not something to be done lightly, if you are already planning to jump ship it can hardly hurt.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Don’t do this. You will just expose the wound and ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company (going above chain of command). Find another job.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Well, what I think you're getting at is this kind of a tactic is inherently escalatory. But the truth is, if you want to get what you want, you need to be willing to play hardball and apply leverage. Of course, the most important part of that is BATNA, which coincides with what you said -- find another job. Where I disagree with you is that it will ruin whatever relationship you have with various parts of the company. Going "above the chain of command" is actually pretty normal and institutionalized process at functional companies -- it's called the skip-level meeting, and it's a deliberate check/feedback mechanism on line managers over-extending on managing upwards rather than downwards. I'd actually argue the opposite point, which is that organizations that fail to properly implement skip-level meetings are missing out on an important mechanism which ensures the chain of command is performant and rooting out structural rot. As a spot check, my observations on every org I've worked at basically vindicate this.

joschmo 6y ago

One of the few things I appreciated about finance was how clear the hierarchy system was. 3 years as an analyst, 3 as an associate, 3 as a VP, 3-5 as a director with promotion to managing director based on hitting clearly defined fee generation markers, and then an eat-what-you-kill model as a managing director with a clear % take rate on what you brought in. And banks have accelerated the early years path to compete with tech and private equity by including accelerated 2-year paths at the analyst and associate levels for top bucket performers. Now these banks are still hemorrhaging junior talent now more than ever, but that's probably more of a function of lifestyle (80-100 weeks for your first 5-6 years before things start settling down). The review cycles are generally okay (not good by any stretch) but manage to capture whether or not someone's impact is outsized and worth accelerating. So a great job of finding the 8-10/10s but pretty poor at delineating between 4-7s. Not possible to use that model in engineering organizations (at least the ones I've seen) because there isn't an apprenticeship model in tech as in finance so it is harder to promote a 7/10 performer every 3 years reliably because they may not be capable of doing the next job due to specialization and less linear skillset building.