[semioticthrowa]

There is not much insight to glean from these career framework docs. The high level takeaway is roughly that a junior engineer should own a feature, a mid-level should own a collection of features and a senior engineer should own a product or a significant chunk of a product and so on.

The docs are frequently developed by the HR function with only incidental input from the actual professionals who are on these career ladders. The input is usually given only by senior executives who have not actually performed the roles that represent 80% of the company by headcount in a decade.

You may notice that the descriptions of responsibilities are both extremely vague and quite expansive. This is by design. The purpose of these frameworks are as follows:

1. To provide maximum flexibility in termination of an employee: Since the framework is essentially impossible to comply with in its entirety, if the manager or management chain of an employee wants to fire them, they can readily develop a plausible sounding justification. 0% of the employees of the company always do all the things listed on in the career framework, so there's always a justification to fire someone. This takes the form of something like "Your performance did not meet XYZ Inc's high standards. You did not complete framework section 6, bullet 3 when you were running project ABC. You aren't meeting the expectations for your job and level, so you are terminated effective immediately."

2. To provide flexibility for justifying promotions or lack thereof: Despite ostensibly having a rigorous process with checks and balances and extensive discussion, the promotion process at large tech companies is largely a subjective discussion that may or may not take into account the contribution impact of the employee. The discussions fall prey to anchoring, herding, and perhaps most importantly lack of blinding (e.g. I can see who is making what arguments, so I can tailor my position to them). Having a broad and vague role description lets the final decision maker justify a positive promotion outcome ("well, X did ABC and that's right here in the L5 description") in almost all cases. At the same time, it lets managers who fail to get their reports promoted say "feedback was that you didn't do Y, which is clearly listed in the L5 role profile."