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Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

dropbox.github.io

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Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#111

Post by tikkabhuna »

mk89 wrote: post #60
tikkabhuna wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and since buying a house, I really feel no need to keep going higher. Property pricing in the UK is extremely damaging. If I found a job at a higher level that I thought I'd really enjoy and that I'd be good at, I'll be interested, but otherwise I'm content.

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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#112

Post by scarface_74 »

wiseowise wrote: post #92
ebiester wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, yes and no. 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 tur…

I have a guy at work that is senior in everything but title. His manager uses "framework" to extort him. This has been going on for at least a year.

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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#113

Post by pknomad »

serial_dev wrote: post #27

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…

You do not but I feel like many places have the element of getting "pushed up or pushed out".

I'm in a similar boat but I haven't seen any place keep up with inflation without some kind of promotion or bonuses.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#114

Post by scarface_74 »

jameshart wrote: post #87
rockyj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn’t sound like you are ‘in the same boat’. 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 wit…

> 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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#115

Post by LittleTimothy »

sabellito wrote: post #56
LittleTimothy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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. Sorry you've worked for such terrible companies.

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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#116

Post by scarface_74 »

mk89 wrote: post #60
tikkabhuna wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and since buying a house, I really feel no need to keep going higher. Property pricing in the UK is extremely damaging. If I found a job at a higher level that I thought I'd really enjoy and that I'd be good at, I'll be interested, but otherwise I'm content.

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.

> 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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#117

Post by jameshart »

sabellito wrote: post #59
SirHound wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because “impact” is generally code for making other people rich. If you’re in a small enough company for your impact to matter, chances are your stock options are still chips, which you might never get to cash in. If the company is post IPO then chances are your impact will never move the needle materially for yourself. Income is really the only thing that matters. When you do the same job and aren’t getting i…

I don't understand the shallow cynicism. Isn't everything we do at a company in order to make the owner and shareholders richer?

Wait a minute… are you telling me the company isn’t just paying me to code because they believe in sponsoring the creation of technological beauty?

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#118

Post by jameshart »

silvestrov wrote: post #24
saagarjha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be reductive to look at it as a multiplier, but really? You don't see synchronizing terabytes of data for millions of people to not be complex? When if you make mistakes you are losing people's photos of their children or their company's financial charts? With hooks in the filesystem to make this all work?

Synchronizing is software that scales well. You need a handful of very good developers, not an evergrowing number. Look at how few developers that SQLite has. That isn't simpler than the dropbox software.

The SQLite development team doesn’t run and operate a scaled set of sqlite instances serving 100,000 enterprise customers and 200 million consumer accounts. They don’t have to run a billing and account management system at scale and provide support for a sales and customer service organization. They aren’t responsible for managing an exabyte or so of other people’s data.

The core storage/synching engine of DropBox is pretty simple, sure. Running DropBox is a lot more than just building that piece of software.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#119

Post by SomeHacker44 »

serial_dev wrote: post #27

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…

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.

Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

#120

Post by anelson »

scarface_74 wrote: post #88
anelson wrote: post #41

When reading BigTech career ladders like this one, I immediately fall into the trap of projecting myself onto the ladder, and getting upset when the level I've chosen for myself is described as something that sounds far removed from what I want to do. I must remind myself to frame this as how Dropbox describes the things that they value in each position. An L7 SWE is the most valuable SWE in Dropbox, as measured by t…

It doesn’t matter how good you are as a developer, you can only have so much impact coding 40 hours a week. I wanted to move up both to increase my autonomy and my vision is much larger than the amount of work I can physically do with my own hands. As a 50 year old who has been doing this for awhile, I can and have: - spent time on zoom calls and flown out to customer’s sites to gather requirements and help close a s…

What you're describing is actually not that different from my own conception of what a senior principal SWE is. Simply stated, I would define that level as a very experienced, knowledgeable, competent SWE whose main value to the org isn't in KLOCs they personally write but as a force multiplier who sees around corners (but also writes their fair share of KLOCs).

What turns me off about the version of an L7 SWE as described in the OP's link is the extent to which it doesn't sound like that at all. Maybe it's my bias against BigTech career ladders, but reading between the lines it sounds to me like it's more about navigating organization, political, and bureaucratic obstacles and attending a lot of meetings and generally being seen to be doing these things.

The point of my comment is that perhaps it is rational for an org like Dropbox to value the ability to do that more highly, but I've been in those roles and I found them personally to be soul-crushing.

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