In all of "career frameworks" I've seen, people who actually build things are labelled as "juniors" and "middles" while those who navigate office politics and ass-kissing are "seniors" and above.
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Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
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Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#22At the end of the day the decision is made on personal level. “I like you” or “I don’t like you”. Such frameworks are just the limits how a manager can show liking/disliking someone. The thing is, that measuring someone’s performance is very hard. It’s not standardized multiple choice written exam. And maybe the company does not need more than quick&dirty, but easy to explain solution.
I don't think it's true. It's in the company's interest that people are evaluated fairly, especially if they are going to give big bonus or agressively fire low performers (like some of these tech companies do). Don't know about Dropbox in particular, but I know other tech companies who take evaluation very seriously. The manager doesn't have the final word and there's a calibration committee that ranks employee base…
Work that makes your boss (or your bosses boss) happy gets you job security and in some companies gets you promoted. If that aligns with “what is best for the company” or an even more distant metric “what is best for the customer“ then thats great, but its not a requirement.
If your boss cares about the customer, then you caring about the customer helps, but often it doesn’t matter much as everyone makes it out to be. On top of that there are way more direct avenues that have a bigger impact on your job development than whatever a user thinks.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I remember correctly, Dropbox was one of the first big tech companies to publish its career framework openly, a lot of organizations (especially smaller ones) based their careers on the Dropbox’s one
Dropbox has 2,693 employees. 37signals has ~80. I can't see Dropbox having a product/sales that is ~30 times as complex. However, I can easily see an organization that has become overly political. Dropbox should be run as a small company and not run it as "big tech". What are all these people doing besides political games?
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?
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox has 2,693 employees. 37signals has ~80. I can't see Dropbox having a product/sales that is ~30 times as complex. However, I can easily see an organization that has become overly political. Dropbox should be run as a small company and not run it as "big tech". What are all these people doing besides political games?
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.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#25What's the boots on the ground feedback on how this (or, rather, the culture it reflects) is currently working out there?
For example, although they say it isn't a promotion checklist, is it treated like one?
What percentage of people are focused more on career advancement than on actual (not paper) positive impact for the company?
How does misalignment rate vary by career track?
How effective and efficient are the orgs that they've built under this culture?
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#26In all of "career frameworks" I've seen, people who actually build things are labelled as "juniors" and "middles" while those who navigate office politics and ass-kissing are "seniors" and above.
Do you think that's a bad thing? writing code != building things. In my org, seniors spend a lot less time building things: writing components, etc. They do spend a lot of time navigating office politics. But they are engineering specific office politics: how does system A interact with system B? What are the architectural implications? Ownership of long term data and technical and business strategies? The "art" of n…
I'm not the one you responded to, but I definitely feel like it's not necessarily a "good" thing or a "bad" thing. Having a senior be more involved in writing some functionality should mean more maintainable code with more complex issues factored in to the solutions, which should mean better predictability when it comes to planning new work.
At the same time, having seniors involved in more abstract discussions before implementation should also lead to better end results. That being said, having my engineers be involved in "ass-kissing" as you put it is honestly not a good use of their time. Leave office politics to engineering managers and project managers, in my opinion.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#27It 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”.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#28At the end of the day the decision is made on personal level. “I like you” or “I don’t like you”. Such frameworks are just the limits how a manager can show liking/disliking someone. The thing is, that measuring someone’s performance is very hard. It’s not standardized multiple choice written exam. And maybe the company does not need more than quick&dirty, but easy to explain solution.
I don't think it's true. It's in the company's interest that people are evaluated fairly, especially if they are going to give big bonus or agressively fire low performers (like some of these tech companies do). Don't know about Dropbox in particular, but I know other tech companies who take evaluation very seriously. The manager doesn't have the final word and there's a calibration committee that ranks employee base…
companies do not really have interests, individual people have interests. The founders, the board, investors, executives, managers, ICs, consultants, vendors, customers. Everyone is doing what their manager (customer) tells them to do while capturing enough value for themselves to make it worth it, recursively. This becomes especially clear when interests diverge, the executives screw the employees, the board screws the founders, the founders screw everyone, the managers accumulate unnecessary headcount so they are responsible for more cashflow, the ICs inflate the estimates, the PMs prioritize visible short term features only.
I also recommend Gervais principle as mandatory read for young managers who don’t yet see the game for what it is.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#29It 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…
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 inflationary bumps then there’s a serious issue.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#30It 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…
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.