It could be that I’m getting old, became a parent and working remotely from the middle of nowhere, but do I need to get to the next level?
I really wouldn’t mind keeping my current salary, adjust it for inflation and I’m good. I don’t care about my title, I don’t want to manage people, I don’t want to work harder than I need to.
I just want to pay off my mortgage, have some leftover money for vacations, have time for my family.
I really don’t care “what my impact could look like at the next level”.
These frameworks serve 3 purposes. The first purpose is to have something concrete to point at so your employees don't sue you over unfair practices - they create a paper trail for management to operate and build evidence that what they are doing follows a meritocratic process (whether that's true or not is irrelevant, it's purely a legal concern). The second purpose is to motivate employees who want progression by setting up a goal posts for them to shoot for so that they try harder and don't leave, but vague and subjective enough to deny you the promotion for a least a cycle or two. The third is that there's all these bloody HR and middle management people hanging around and they need something to do.
So the only way this process is relevant to you is that your manager might want to look good to their manager by demonstrating that they're "developing" your "talent". It's a nice favour to your boss to let them pretend their job isn't totally meaningless in this respect, but I'm in the same boat as you, I couldn't care less about progression.
I'm also in the same boat as both of you, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I need to do a bunch of extra work to prove some nebulous concept like "impact at the next level" or whatever buzzwoo we want to say in place of that. If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so.
I feel like making everyone at the lower levels shoulder all of the accountability is the exact opposite of what we need to do when it comes to improving operations across the board.
> If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so.
You are responsible for your own career. When (hypothetical) you get ready to look for another job, do you really want to only be able to say that you were a ticket taker or do you want to be able to say you led initiatives?
Even if you don’t really care about getting ahead, you still have to be able to stand out from other applicants
One way to stand out is to be nice, funny, and make a genuine personal connection with whoever the decision makers are. It sounds cheesy but it’s worked for me back when I didn’t particularly stand out.
I was competent though, which is always a requirement; this won’t work for smooth talkers only.
Now when I interview you, I’m not going to ask you to reverse a btree on the whiteboard. I’m going to ask you questions to see if you can “handle ambiguity” and work at the scope I need you to work at.
I’ve spent the last decade mostly as one of the early technical hires for a major new initiative and then leading cloud consulting projects (3.5 years at Amazon and now at a third party company both full time). I need to know I can throw a vague set of business requirements at you and you can take the ball and run with it.
I actually did a thumbs down to a very smart guy who had been laid off from the AWS EC2 service team because when I asked him behavioral questions, I didn’t get a sense that he could handle the type of green field initiatives I was going to throw at him.
You don’t, actually. People love to be flattered, and the trick is to go find whoever is making the decisions and to flatter them.
You’re not immune to this either. No one is. Again, competence is a requirement, but flattery plus competence is a very powerful way to distinguish yourself.
I am very immune to flattery at 50 years old. While like I said I don’t do coding interviews, I am asking behavioral questions to assess whether you are “smart and gets things done”.
My main motivation for impactfulness is just making my job more pleasant: Nothing is more soul-sucking than fixing the same kinds of issues over and over because the powers that be are convinced they're doing it right, and you're the one stuck fixing the issues they create.
My main motivation is for my resume to look good for my n+1 job. I don’t always know when I’m going to be looking or whether it’s by force or by choice. But I always want to be prepared
I never said anything about not being responsible for my own career. There was a previous implication that we need to help the boss look good, which is BS. If I want to develop myself because I want to explore different options or expand my skill set, I am free to and generally opt to do so. If a manager wants to develop my skills, then that is their responsibility.
Again, let's not shift all the accountability to the guys lower on the ladder. It's a team effort.
Perhaps I just don't understand your mindset because I do not define myself by my career. Work is just how I exchange some of my time and effort for money so I can focus my life on the things I actually matter to me, so the "weight" of my career is perhaps different than yours. Which is fine, btw. I don't really have any issues if someone wants to make their career their life, but I'll never align with that, especially not at this late in my adult life.
I don’t define myself by my career. But I do make damn sure I stay competitive. I’ve had 10 jobs in 28 years and 8 since 2008. I stay prepared to look for another job at a moments notice.
The “team” doesn’t care about you being competitive when you are looking for your next job.
Mid-40's, and many lessons learned by paying attention to those who paved the way ahead of me. Don't get me wrong, I'm a hard worker with a reputation for keeping my promises in an industry that is infamous for the opposite (manufacturing, without getting too deep into my role in that sector for the sake of keeping this brief), so I can't really complain about my wages or the recognition I have gotten in the past. But it's still just a job. My real life is my family, my hobbies and my adventures. When strangers ask me what I "do," I generally like to reply with those things rather than talking about work.
As for the email, it was part of a now-dead idea that grew out of boredom one evening while chatting with some old computer friends, and definitely involved different sounding farts. Never really got past a few lines of code, but I have been thinking about using the domain for a cranky old git blog or something.
Unfortunately, getting more for less is the point. Oncw these business are in flight, 99% of the work is "menial" and managers win by driving salaries down. A good way to do that is only raise salaries do to external challenges. Internally, do everything for minimal maintenance.
Keep in mind, the Art of War can easily be seen as a dummy's guide to product management and is just a default minimum because age managers are often selected by the peter principle.
I've worked in companies with similar frameworks both as a dev and as manager, and it was great. Everything has issues, but the framework gave useful guidance.
I'm not saying it doesn't work. Especially for early careers people, it works absolutely fine because the requirements are reasonable and the scope is largely within the employees control. For later stage employees, it's usefulness tales off massively. When you get to senior levels your ability to fulfil the requirements gets further and further out of your hands and often if you want to pursue the promotional criteria you're actually going to have to deprioritize delivering value to the business to prioritize engineering situations where you can meet the criteria. A lot of the senior goals are basically politics.
There's nothing shallow about it. Companies don't make "levelling up" worthwhile unless you have your ego invested in your title in an unhealthy way. If you hang out at senior+/staff level you can just plug away until retirement.
Career frameworks at corporations should be mostly ignored. They are thinly veiled attempts to extract more work from the same employees. This is why "there's always room for improvement" is seemingly infinite. Your performance reviews can be stellar, BUT you surely must want to sacrifice more of your time and mental health to move to the next rung, right?
It takes effort to become better than you are at your current level. To get past junior, that should happen by osmosis. For some people, talent alone will take them to senior. For others, they will need to put in the time to learn how do work more efficiently.
Consider that it will take a senior developer 20 hours to do a job a junior might take 80 and the quality will be better for the senior. In turn, the senior may only code 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 in something that might take a staff engineer 5 hours.
I have never gotten a “promotion” in 28 years of working across 10 jobs.
I’ve always changed jobs. It’s a lot easier to get a “promotion” as part of an interview when you control the narrative than going through the promo process.
Besides because of salary compression and inversion, even if you do get an internal promotion, you will probably make less than someone coming in at your level.
And if that’s the case, you have to find another position.
But I’ll tell you the lack of a framework does not change anything. Then all you get is “in my judgment, you haven’t proven yourself to be senior yet.”
And the result is the same: the person leaves to a place that will appreciate them.
If as you are moving up in you career and you are doing “more” work and not “different” work, you’re doing it wrong.
It means you’re failing at some combination of knowing how to delegate, how to communicate trade offs between time, cost and requirements and how to prioritize
I am in the same boat. Specially after delivering multiple high impact systems and still getting the talk - "This is great, but not enough for the next promotion". So after a while I just realized that these levels are artificial and meaningless to a large extent.
The OP said they don’t care about promotion to the next level they just want to keep getting paid to do the same job.
You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility.
Those aren’t the same thing, even if the way both of you are reacting is with a similar kind of cynical dismissal of the idea that a ‘career framework’ can help you with your needs.
Which is weird because it honestly sounds like both of you are looking for a clear career framework. Either one in OP’s case where it’s clear what ‘coasting’ looks like - meeting expectations for a level year after year and not striving for promotion; or one in your case where it’s very clear to you what you need to do to reach the next level.
You can object to the implementation of the promotion policy under a framework, but your problem is not with the concept of a career framework - if there were no guidance for job levels you would be in an even worse position when it comes to complaining about your promotion prospects.
> You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility.
But you don’t need a “promotion” for that. Even when I was at BigTech, there was nothing stopping me from volunteering for a more impactful project. No one was going to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to do it because of my level.
I had a junior consultant/returning intern that I mentored as an intern and then when they came back over a smaller project that usually would not have gone to someone at their level. They had proven to the department that we could trust them to both do the work and be in front of the customer.
I was there as a backstop if needed. But when we flew fk the customers site, I intentionally stayed in the background and deferred to them.
Same for me. I enjoy what I do, but if I didn’t need the money, I sure as wouldn’t be doing it for someone else. I’d just be working on whatever projects I found interesting.
Career goals? Keep things as they are.
Work is only something I have to do to have a decent life the rest of the time.
Unfortunately it feels very difficult to say that in earshot of one’s employer without being branded some sort of burnout slacker, even though I do work hard and to a high standard.
Well, you could think about making more money for retirement. Not saying you need to get crazy about it, though.
I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today. Not that I am rich, far from it, but I am not sure I want to ask my kids for help... and that seems more and more the direction we're moving in.
You're right. My post was mainly focusing on expenses and living standards. I'm already contributing above average to my pension and I'm hoping that any above inflation payrises I do get go towards retiring early.
> I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today
Then don’t. I’m 50 and my wife (48) spent the last four years “decontenting” our lives. I started working remotely in 2020 and we sold our big house in the burbs (for twice what we had it built for in 2016) after our youngest graduated and downsized to a condo in state tax free Florida. We are now down to one car and our fixed expenses are a nothing burger.
She also “retired” at 44 and spends time on her passion projects. We travel a lot and have done the digital nomad thing for a year flying one way trips across the country. In other words, when I do retire, we will already have cleared most of our bucket list.
I’m kind of in the same boat, I did my first and hopefully only stint at BigTech between 46-49. During that time my youngest (step)son graduated and moved out on his own, we paid off some debt, downsized to a smaller condo , sold our big house in the burbs and started traveling a lot after I started working remotely.
Yes I am a “staff” engineer at a smaller company now - equivalent in pay to around what I was making as an l5 (mid level) at BigTech. But with a lot less stress. I have no need to make more money except for inflation adjustments
I CAN'T tell you how much I felt your comment. This about drove me wild in my career - dealing with the "need to level up" and having different rotating Ems who each get differing pictures of what that should look like. I just wanted to be left alone (career/rank up wise) to do great work.
I'm a line manager and tech lead at a big company. I have both direct reports and mentees that don't report to me but I'm helping with their trajectory who have that attitude ("I'm fine where I am") and it's mostly fine with some caveats.
One: you may actually be doing really well and deserve a promotion (or it would be relatively easy to get) but your imposter syndrome is blocking you from realizing this.
Two: you may not even be doing that well at your current level- promotion is out of reach, but we actually need to make sure you don't get out on a PIP or something. Not everyone is good at recognizing this in themselves. (Similar problem of metacognition, I suspect to point one).
Three: there is usually not enough L+1 work to go around on any given team, especially one in big companies that have been slowing down hiring juniors (if all the level 1 get promoted to 2 and not replaced, eventually the system will be too heavy). So this is mostly good, but if you don't communicate active interest in promotion to your manager, you're likely to get the least interesting (for some value of interesting, let's say at a minimum least promotable) work.
You may be fine with this, and as a manager I'm okay with it- someone has to do it and if I have some reports who aren't striving but are still solid, I can give them stuff to do and worry about the promotability of the reports who are likely to leave if they feel their trajectory is slowing down.
EDIT: the fourth caveat is, I'm just a line manager at some place. I don't speak for leadership (they may want to lay off all the non strivers, who knows) or even other managers.
As an entrepreneur, 25 year manager and now mid level IC employee of a big tech firm... Good for you. As a manager I always told people I would kill for a team of people mostly composed of folks happy with what they are doing. It is sooo hard to manage a team of people where most are striving for advancement, especially when that cannot come soon enough for them (and especially when they do not believe they are not there yet).
I am trying to be this way, as I do personally love the work, but I would like one and maybe two promotions for the improved earnings and additional autonomy it would provide.
It depends on the company. A few companies have a terminal level that is approximately equivalent to Dropbox's IC3/IC4. This level does not involve managing people, but it does require owning projects that can span across several teams.
Dropbox does have a terminal level which I think was IC4 when I was there.
On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.
These tools and many other from the HR handbook are mainly meant as communication tools. For some employees it's easy to talk about their motivations and goals within your company. With other employees you'll have to pull an answer out of them and it'll be a "yes" or a "no", I mean, it's obviously not that bad but some employees are really bad at talking about these things. Some managers are also very bad at it. The tools help frame the context for 1-on-1's where you need to talk about what sort of path an employee wants to go on over the next year. Sometimes these tools are misused, for some people here on HN, that will probably even be the only way they have interacted with them.
As far as your personal motivation goes. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an engineer. That doesn't mean you have to be stagnant though. A career path could be there to make sure you don't get bored, and then revisited to keep up. That is if it's done right. I'm not sure this dropbox engineering career framework is really very good. I glossed over the SWE part and it's so ridicilously vague that it will likely depend completely on the manager applying it. So in some cases it'll probably be a good communications tool and in others it'll be used as for employee metrics. A good manager would allow you to do what you want to do, while keeping you on course with what the company wants. If that means leaving you to do whatever you do for a while, then that is fine. Bad managers will not do this, but at least managers tend to change often enough that you can mostly just tell them what they want to hear and then wait for them to be replaced.
I personally wouldn't pick a company like Dropbox to "just do" engineering though. Too many hot-shots, too much bullshit, it's much easier to get some real work done in boring industries like banking or energy.
Because you're expected to get to the next level in good time, otherwise you're not good enough and will be fired. The level you can stay at is typically the level below Staff.
I really wouldn’t mind keeping my current salary, adjust it for inflation and I’m good. I don’t care about my title, I don’t want to manage people, I don’t want to work harder than I need to.
I just want to pay off my mortgage, have some leftover money for vacations, have time for my family.
I really don’t care “what my impact could look like at the next level”.