[devjab]

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.