Our Engineering Ladder

Photo by John T on Unsplash

The Problem Statement

Over the course of any startup’s evolution, you get to a point where career advancement, professional growth and organizational structure becomes pretty critical in order to continue scaling teams. From a people management standpoint it’s also important to:

• Give engineers a sense of their progress. A rubric is a good way to show that.
• Align on hiring criteria. A more unified understanding of what a Senior Engineer is versus a Principal Engineer.

Startups also don’t typically have (or allocate) the budget to buy existing job description and leveling information. These are available from Human Resource consulting firms, but can be quite expensive. Further, depending on the source of the job descriptions, they often are not quite really a fit for a number of reasons.

At JW Player, we were at such an inflection point and just like many other startups, we set about creating a career ladder. Taking inspiration from a number of sources(a), we wanted to share our approach and make it available to the community in case you find it helpful.

Our Approach

A goal from the beginning was to try and remain technology or toolset agnostic. For example, the programming language or automation tools that you use are not the determinators of whether you are a senior engineer or a principal engineer. This has the further benefit of not becoming misaligned or dated as new technologies are incorporated into our solutions.

The key things we wanted to quantify (and qualify) were the skills an individual contributor or manager uses in the performance of their work. Also the level of proficiency in using those skills. In other words, was the use of that skill a one time thing or does that person always perform at that level. For this we gravitated towards Role Playing Game (RPG) attributes(b) to describe a simplified set of just four skills.

Engineering Attributes

The attributes we use are Intelligence, Dexterity, Wisdom and Charisma (INT, DEX, WIS, CHA). We’ll describe them further in a bit, but it’s important to note that these skills are earned over time, gained and mastered with experience. Every person moves at their pace and may advance different attributes at different times; it is organic and non-linear.

INT(elligence)

Intelligence is the ability to problem solve — the individual’s technical skills and knowledge.

DEX(terity)

Dexterity is the ability to flex between tasks, the person’s accuracy in their work as well as speed and adaptability.

WIS(dom)

Wisdom captures the individual’s ability to see the bigger picture and discern the intended outcome.

CHA(risma)

Charisma conveys one’s ability to influence, their communication skills, a force of personality in a positive way.

With these attributes placed on a quadrant, you can start to visualize how different career progressions might look (see figure 1). This is just for illustrative purposes and not something we utilize today, but some people find it helpful to have a mental model of where they are strong and where they need to grow to advance.

Figure 1

An example senior software engineer is in figure 2 below. In that quadrant you can see how the person indexes strong on INT (problem solving ability, technical skills), shows some amount of DEX (flexibility, speed, accuracy, adaptability), a lesser amount in WIS (see the bigger picture, discern the intended outcome), and less in CHA (ability to influence, communication skills, force of personality in a positive way). Figure 3 shows what would be a principal engineer and you can see how the individual has mastery on the INT and DEX side and shows solid skills on the WIS and CHA quadrants as well.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Engineering Rubric

Each level in our engineering ladder has a set of ‘skills’ that pertain to the corresponding attribute. As one advances in their proficiency of those skills with consistency and over time, they start to lean towards the next level in their career growth. The skills are cumulative in that the prior level skills are still applicable as you advance. As an example, below are the INT attributes for a software engineer:

• Developing broad knowledge and skills in a specific area (team).
• Performs research, analysis or investigations.

To be a senior software engineer, you would have become proficient in the above skills and have shown consistently over time that you have achieved a level of competence in the below INT skills:

• Applies broad knowledge and skills in a specific area (team).
• Quality of work demonstrates practical experience in their area.
• Subject matter expert (SME) and owner of a service or component.

With the above examples you can see how the descriptions are not tied to specific technologies used, but how the person is performing. As previously mentioned this flexibility made it possible to use the ladder for any type of engineering role including; frontend, backend, test engineering and devops roles.

At JW Player we have two engineering tracks, one for individual contributors and one for managers. We use the same rubric for both. So, taking a similar look at the managerial track, here are an engineering manager’s INT skills:

• Applies diverse knowledge in broad areas.
• Applies various techniques gained through practical experience to maximize team results.
• Performs ‘hands on’ work that is appropriate to help the team meet objectives (e.g. coding)

It’s important to note that the first level managers at JW Player are still ‘hands on’ in whatever form is appropriate. They are still close enough to the technology implementation that they are expected to be contributing. It doesn’t mean being on the critical path for deliverables, but does mean planning work distribution, reviewing code or design approach, maybe some bug fixes, helping the team execute efficiently. Jumping ahead to the director level manager we see the INT skills as:

• Applies thorough knowledge and deep practical experience to help guide teams in making the right choices (technical, processes, people).
• Uses advanced techniques to simplify or unblock execution in the completion of assignments to maximize teams results.
• Performs research, analysis or investigations, staying technical though less hands-on (e.g. prototyping versus production coding)

As we think of an individual’s skills advancement, not every skill across all the attributes moves at the same pace. You may have ‘mastery’ in one skill but still ‘developing’ in another. We use the following terms when discussing the level of accomplishment:

• Mastery
• Proficient
• Developing
• Emerging
• (not applicable)

Implementation

The resulting engineering ladder and skills translates pretty faithfully to what you will find at a Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook. Our intention was not to be off the rails with what we defined, but to be consistent with how the industry sees these roles. To that end, there is also an ‘Experience’ column in the rubric which we’ve found to be the most contentious aspect of this. It’s there as a guideline, not a roadblock. The years of experience is more than anything intended to convey the need to demonstrably show skills competency over an extended time.

Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash

An analogy that we’ve used, if you are familiar with martial arts, is belting up. You practice your forms, compete, repeat and over time you show that you are ready to be promoted to the next belt color. That takes some time and depends a lot on how much you put into it and opportunities that become available to show your stuff.

By collectively using INT/DEX/WIS/CHA when talking about our careers/roles it has started to become a sort of lingua franca. A common language we have used in other contexts like our bi-annual reviews. We’ve even started to use it in recruiting, to suss out a candidate’s DEX or CHA, as an example.

The complete rubric is available in our GitHub. Feel free to use it as is or modify it to suit your needs. We welcome any feedback to help improve the rubric too.

References:
a) Camille Fournier’s RTR Ladder, ASCE 2007 “Guidelines for Engineering Grades”
b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_(role-playing_games)

For Extra Credit

A parting thought, as you look at the quadrant and how you think about skills growth and demonstration. The axis themselves align with an overall view of a persons ‘operating mode’. For the most part, people are malleable in how they operate based on the task at hand, so these are not fixed and can change all the time either per project or as they move along in their career. As shown in figure 4 below, the axis’ align rather well with the following operating modes.

Figure 4

Strategic

Seeing the bigger picture and discerning the intended outcome/possibilities coupled with adaptability and flexibility in thinking paint a rather ‘strategic’ operating mode.

Tactical

An ability to problem solve with technical skills and knowledge coupled with the ability to bring others with you with communication skills and personality are very ‘tactical’ capabilities.

Doer

Someone who can problem solve with technical skills and knowledge coupled with flexibility, accuracy and speed is a ‘doer’.

Influencer

Seeing the bigger picture and discerning the intended outcome/possibilities coupled with the ability to bring others with you with communication skills and personality is an ‘influencer’.