At a past company, we went from 3 promotion levels to 10. There is a document that outlines what engineers at each level should be working on, much like https:/

At a past company, we went from 3 promotion levels to 10. There is a document that outlines what engineers at each level should be working on, much like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcff882f-083e-4512-b91e-36fc0a117134_1348x1270.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... The goal of the company was to provide standard ways to calibrate engineer levels for promotions and performance management. Guess what happened: Most managers started rating engineers on exactly that rubric. If you miss something in the rubric, you get a lower rating. So engineers started following the rubric precisely. Which meant, every senior engineer spent more time on managing 2-3 junior engineers. Wrote at least 1 RFC every 6 months. And basically checked boxes on the sheet so as to not miss out anything during a performance review. Nothing got delivered from the team. Morale in the team dropped. And nothing really mattered except the career ladder document. Engineers spent more time managing the career ladder document than actually delivering anything. Managers spent more time rating people than actually delivering anything. Features were half-assed, customers started getting frustrated. And clueless upper management started putting more pressure on engineers instead of looking at themselves and asking how they can improve processes.