[nthngtshr]

I've never worked at a big company and my immediate reaction is that I don't like this. It feels like most HN commentators share this kind of sentiment.

I'm genuinely wondering what people on the other side of this debate think about this. If you like having systems like this in your organization, what is it that you like about it?

I feel like in my case it would totally discourage me from actually trying to make the company do better and instead would make me focus too much on trying to please people who rate me on these criteria. But I guess maybe that happens in a large organization anyways. And I guess in that case it's nice to have at least some (albeit not perfect) set of rules. Is that kind of the idea for having these?

[UncleMeat]

> I'm genuinely wondering what people on the other side of this debate think about this. If you like having systems like this in your organization, what is it that you like about it?

I like it. There are limitations and the frameworks can be misaligned with the ideal goals, but in general it provides the following benefits.

1. You aren't completely at the whim of your manager. Managers need to actually document what you did and why that aligns with whatever level on these frameworks. Other managers can provide oversight on this. The alternative is that career success is 100% opaque and based on the feelings of one person.

2. It helps me as a manager do performance evaluations. I'm glad to have a framework than to just go based on my feelings, because my feelings are often wrong.

3. It can help shift priorities for an organization that is working on the wrong stuff. This is hard and requires careful language and training, but in an ideal world these sorts of frameworks allow people to align their personal career goals with the goals of the company.

If you can make the company do better without pleasing the framework, then the framework may be wrong or perhaps your priorities are wrong. I've seen the latter plenty of times. Somebody insists that their work is just obviously impactful and therefore they don't need to measure anything but they are forced to measure it due to framework requirements and, surprise surprise, what they did wasn't that important after all.

[ryandrake]

> You aren't completely at the whim of your manager. Managers need to actually document what you did and why that aligns with whatever level on these frameworks. Other managers can provide oversight on this. The alternative is that career success is 100% opaque and based on the feelings of one person.

This is the biggest important part. When your compensation, access to good projects, and career growth depend entirely on your manager, and you are not in the "in group," it's worse than demotivating--it's a feeling of hopelessness. You can document everything you did as evidence and none of it matters because your manager just doesn't like you. If you're lucky, you're at a company that encourages moving around and you can hope to luck into a better manager, because that's your only way out of the prison.

EDIT:

Unlike most of the commenters here, I love these written ladders, and I sincerely wish more companies did them. I would seriously favor companies that had written ladders over companies where it's hidden mysticism. When you are a "ladder climber" work personality, it is imperative that you can actually comprehend the actual requirements for getting to the next level--otherwise, how do you do get there? Guessing? When promotion happens at your manager's whim, it seems to have less to do with your work output and more to do with how well you brown nosed and smooth talked.

[blowski]

Big companies have to put these kinds of frameworks in place to ensure they’re treating everyone equally. Otherwise you end up with the absurd situations of two different people being rewarded differently despite performing the same job equally well merely because they have a different manager.

The downside is everyone becomes a cog in the machine, with nobody being treated like an individual with their own strengths, weaknesses, needs, fears, and aspirations.

[systemvoltage]

The language here is so imprecise that if someone had intentions to treat someone unequally, they’ll do that anyways whether they have a framework in place or not.

This is just a bunch of corporate malarkey, let’s be brutally nakedly honest here. The fact is that this is just a more SV version of corporate bullshit with emojis - same exact thing you find in an old corporation like GE or IBM, just dressed up differently.

[blowski]

Absolutely, bad managers can still be bad managers, even with a framework like this.

But it can help big companies in two ways:

1. You can assess bad managers against the framework, show how they are not delivering it, and remove an excuse that they “didn’t realise”.

2. Help good managers see what’s required in common situations.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you that this is often corporate malarkey. Typically, the company doesn’t live up to the framework - it’s merely wallpapering for their own biases, which still come through anyway. But I understand why they try, and it sometimes works better than others. Not doing anything would probably be even worse. And all other solutions have their own problems. At enterprise level, there is no universal solution.

[systemvoltage]

> For what it’s worth, I agree with you that this is often corporate malarkey. Typically, the company doesn’t live up to the framework - it’s merely wallpapering for their own biases, which still come through anyway. But I understand why they try, and it sometimes works better than others. Not doing anything would probably be even worse. And all other solutions have their own problems. At enterprise level, there is no universal solution.

I laughed out loud, just like real life Dilbert. I can imagine how these meetings would go. I think we gotta take this bullshit lightly and not get too caught up in its utility (there is none, even though you’re trying and I can empathize). Just act like it’s all great, do work, go home. I presume most people know it’s bullshit but still roll with it. I pity those who don’t. Gotta love enterprise life and it’s depressing if we don’t take it lightly. Office Space reminded us in a hysterical way.

[blowski]

Even your most successful solutions will be inspiration for somebody else's "enterprises are screwed up" cartoons. Enterprises are just too complex, so that good solutions appear stupid to most people since they don't have all the information necessary to understand why that decision was made. But, of course, there are also a lot of stupid solutions because of bad reasons.

[potamic]

I have been part of such initiatives in other organizations. The language is deliberately imprecise to give managers room to maneuver. It is also set to unattainable standards to make it easy to justify why someone is not getting promoted.

Appraisals are always highly subjective and frameworks like these are simply ways for the company to build a narrative of meritocracy and fairness. It's arguable how well it works though, because people generally see through such charades. But for some reason it's taboo to admit the inherent subjectivity in this process.

[blowski]

I've been pulled into meetings with people trying to write these things, and I can honestly say that they always seem sincere about trying to make the company a better place. It's not an excuse for cynical "hah, this load of bullshit will fool everyone". What's more, they're smart enough to know exactly how many people will see it that way.

Doing this kind of thing can't be the only thing do as a company to improve culture, just like a coding style document won't magically improve a codebase.

But, as part of a wider attempt to make things better, it can be useful.

[benhurmarcel]

In a lot of organizations, the language in the descriptions doesn't matter. Over time it becomes a fact that a contributor at a certain job with a certain experience should be a given level. That's it.

[jonathankoren]

> The downside is everyone becomes a cog in the machine, with nobody being treated like an individual with their own strengths, weaknesses, needs, fears, and aspirations.

Being treated as a fungible human resource is as much a corporate culture issue, as it is a management issue. The creation of explicit levels and expectations is immaterial here. I’d argue the lack of levels, removes rewards and further dehumanizes individuals by literally treating them all the same.

[hellisothers]

Everybody is not being treated the same, there are ~20 criteria listed for SWE and you can have any of them be strengths or weaknesses! Everybody is unique-ish and established criteria allow a good balance between uniqueness and fairness.

[makeitdouble]

The alternative is to have a set of managers write prose about how good or not their people are, make vague proposal for raises, to have them approved or not depending on how liked they are by their own managers.

It more or less works, but getting a raise/bonus or not just feels like playing blind bingo most of the time. I once had a manager explain that regardless of the actual project results, because the product people felt stressed and unsure of delivery he wouldn’t give good ratings to the team members. Fighting it back we were just told that he was the one in charge of the criteria.

Career frameworks are vague and there’s still tons of politics in applying it, but at least you have a fighting chance to argue about what you were expected to do, what you did, and about how much you should receive accordingly (these levels are usually associated with salary/bonus scales)

PS: to address the obvious point, if one is constantly fighting, leaving for a better place is the best option, but in a large enough company you could instead change manager. Having a grid setting where you stand in the org also help these horizontal moves.

[jeffyang]

I have things I like and things I don't like about it.

I like it because I see it as a guide that helps people understand how to grow and also a framework for fair compensation.

Without guidance many people, especially early in their career, will not grow as fast as they want to grow. They will need to find other ways to get this guidance, such as a good mentor. Some people learn better with a mentor, some people learn better with a framework.

Without a compensation framework, it's hard to reason about whether people are fairly compensated across the board. So what happens is that people start to develop these anyways. If not done explicitly that means that everyone has to independently do the work of coming up with their own framework and then everyone ends up with different frameworks, resulting in things being less fair. A shared understanding and a shared language can be really helpful.

I don't like it because I feel like it will inevitably change from guidance to a checklist. And then it gets political and competitive. Just like you said, people definitely start focusing on the rating. A lot. I think there could be ways to combat this, but I think it's a difficult problem.

I think no matter what you implement, there's a tradeoff. For example, my current thought is that I want it to be more about guidance and less about compensation. So it's guidance on where to grow (if you aren't sure) and de-emphasize the compensation part. How do you do that? I think you basically need to make the guidance more general and then tailor it to a person. Therefore the guidance will be more hand wavy so you sacrifice some fairness. By de-emphasizing compensation, you'd probably also be making people who thrive on promotions and leveling up less happy.

I would honestly love to hear people's thoughts on this as I'm thinking about defining levels in the next few months.

[AYBABTME]

I was at a unicorn that didn't have any career level/framework and was growing fast. _Many_ engineers and ICs were asking management to add such a framework. In other cases, other employees were complaining that "titles actually do matter", claiming that the lack of rank or title was hurting their future prospects (which wasn't wrong, for better or worse). A good amount of hires refused offers because their title didn't match their prior roles. And then when a title was made for them, the title became an informal career ladder within the org. And then comparisons were made and requests to be ranked similarly made.

So strangely, it was the employees that requested and pushed for this. Personally, back then I was not interested in the whole thing. Still not that into it, but I'd be more on the fence.

[notmeatall]

I work at a big'ish company with a system like this. They also started doing Scaled Agile for Enterprise (SaFe) after I started here, which is just straight up waterfall disguised in agile speak. I feel like a cog and I feel my soul draining away. I've given myself a deadline until August to quit.

[pm90]

You’re absolutely right. The most likely thing to happen is that a clueless middle manager will look at these criteria and ask their reports to justify, point by point how they’re achieving or not achieving the different things listed in these criteria and if they’re not how they can “improve”. It’s a supremely shitty way to chart out ones career growth. It’s going to lead to sooo many copycat “we do our career ladder like Dropbox so we must be just as good” clones.

On the other hand, I’m also somewhat glad that this shit is in published form and not some secondhand version pieced together by ex Dropboxers. I personally liked that it lays out what kind of a developer they expect at different levels.

I guess what I’m saying is that I like this as a guide rather than as a rule.

[jokethrowaway]

The people on the other side of the debate are the ones creating these sort of frameworks.

I can understand this is a reasonable response when you're given the task of evaluating people and pay them accordingly.

Still, this is exactly the reason I hate being an employee. I don't think the employee model is really good, in general.

In the end the role title is meaningless and if a contributor doing good work threatens to leave, it's usually cheaper to bump his pay than to pay for a recruiter's fee, interviewing, onboarding and risk of bad hires.

This doesn't work with weird hiring rules in crazy places (Eg. Amazon's expectation of firing a certain number of people).

[sokoloff]

I’ve worked on building these systems for our company. I don’t think they’re perfect by any means, but once you have more than about 20 people their presence is better than their absence, especially at the first three levels in the hierarchy (where there is broad commonality in contributions and expectations at the first two levels, with individual variation of course).

When people (often terrible leaders) try to distill the framework into a checklist of activities, things tend to go quite badly.

[Graffur]

I have only worked at one big company so I am used to these type of job profiles. I dislike them though.

What is it like working at a smaller company? I would love to except I imagine the pay would be worse (in my country - non USA)