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Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
91–100 of 136 posts
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Career frameworks at corporations should be mostly ignored. They are thinly veiled attempts to extract more work from the same employees. This is why "there's always room for improvement" is seemingly infinite. Your performance reviews can be stellar, BUT you surely must want to sacrifice more of your time and mental health to move to the next rung, right?
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.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#93In 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 do think it's a bad thing, but not for the reason you think.
Promotion is an inherently political process. "Impact" is really short for "impact on the business leaders' opinion of me".
I think it's a bad thing when a promotion process that is political, pretends to not be political by dressing itself up with flowery language. What it leads to is engineers burning themselves out trying to deliver real value, then getting passed up because they didn't make the right appeals to the shadow council.
If we all know the process is political then we should at least work toward transparency, so that people know that it's not enough to work hard and deliver results, you also have to advertise and network yourself.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#94It 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…
I CAN'T tell you how much I felt your comment. This about drove me wild in my career - dealing with the "need to level up" and having different rotating Ems who each get differing pictures of what that should look like. I just wanted to be left alone (career/rank up wise) to do great work.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In the orgs that I have worked in, there were very few developers who could actually handle coding complex features and applications. The people navigating the office politics are important, but let's not pretend they are actually capable of pulling off the work. They can understand that "system A interacts with system B" at a high conceptual level, but are not capable of digging down at the detailed level necessary…
My current org is the opposite. Loads of Very Smart Developers all building supposedly brilliant stuff in isolation for their fiefdom without any regard for how it fits into the bigger picture.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#96It 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 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.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so. You are responsible for your own career. When (hypothetical) you get ready to look for another job, do you really want to only be able to say that you were a ticket taker or do you want to be able to say you led initiatives? Even if you don’t really care about getting ahead, you still have to be able to stand…
One way to stand out is to be nice, funny, and make a genuine personal connection with whoever the decision makers are. It sounds cheesy but it’s worked for me back when I didn’t particularly stand out. I was competent though, which is always a requirement; this won’t work for smooth talkers only.
First you got to get through the HR process.
Now when I interview you, I’m not going to ask you to reverse a btree on the whiteboard. I’m going to ask you questions to see if you can “handle ambiguity” and work at the scope I need you to work at.
I’ve spent the last decade mostly as one of the early technical hires for a major new initiative and then leading cloud consulting projects (3.5 years at Amazon and now at a third party company both full time). I need to know I can throw a vague set of business requirements at you and you can take the ball and run with it.
I actually did a thumbs down to a very smart guy who had been laid off from the AWS EC2 service team because when I asked him behavioral questions, I didn’t get a sense that he could handle the type of green field initiatives I was going to throw at him.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also in the same boat as both of you, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I need to do a bunch of extra work to prove some nebulous concept like "impact at the next level" or whatever buzzwoo we want to say in place of that. If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so. I feel like making everyone at the lower levels shoulder all of the account…
> If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so. You are responsible for your own career. When (hypothetical) you get ready to look for another job, do you really want to only be able to say that you were a ticket taker or do you want to be able to say you led initiatives? Even if you don’t really care about getting ahead, you still have to be able to stand…
My main motivation for impactfulness is just making my job more pleasant: Nothing is more soul-sucking than fixing the same kinds of issues over and over because the powers that be are convinced they're doing it right, and you're the one stuck fixing the issues they create.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing code is easy when you have a spec to work to. It more or less writes itself - see Getting that spec is damned hard. What do i mean by spec? Basically are you going to build the right thing. A hard problem - if you think it’s easy, it more than likely means you didn’t understand the problem. The reason pinning down a spec is so hard is because at the macro level, there are very few actual solutions - mostly on…
Sorry, I think that's delusional and if anything maybe only applicable to the very narrow and simple problem space. Nobody writes out the "spec" for the next best inference engine or the next best distributed database.
The senior needs to figure out that the next best inference engine or the next best distributed database are what needs to be built in the first place (or beating about the bush as you said). That’s hard. Lots of conflict to be explored.
Once it’s been captured what needs to be done (spec) enabling the rest of the team (execute) is comparatively easy.
Fail to spec, and the team can’t execute. They don’t know what needs to be built.
Re: Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
#100It 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…
I'm a line manager and tech lead at a big company. I have both direct reports and mentees that don't report to me but I'm helping with their trajectory who have that attitude ("I'm fine where I am") and it's mostly fine with some caveats.
One: you may actually be doing really well and deserve a promotion (or it would be relatively easy to get) but your imposter syndrome is blocking you from realizing this.
Two: you may not even be doing that well at your current level- promotion is out of reach, but we actually need to make sure you don't get out on a PIP or something. Not everyone is good at recognizing this in themselves. (Similar problem of metacognition, I suspect to point one).
Three: there is usually not enough L+1 work to go around on any given team, especially one in big companies that have been slowing down hiring juniors (if all the level 1 get promoted to 2 and not replaced, eventually the system will be too heavy). So this is mostly good, but if you don't communicate active interest in promotion to your manager, you're likely to get the least interesting (for some value of interesting, let's say at a minimum least promotable) work.
You may be fine with this, and as a manager I'm okay with it- someone has to do it and if I have some reports who aren't striving but are still solid, I can give them stuff to do and worry about the promotability of the reports who are likely to leave if they feel their trajectory is slowing down.
EDIT: the fourth caveat is, I'm just a line manager at some place. I don't speak for leadership (they may want to lay off all the non strivers, who knows) or even other managers.