Every company builds and follows specific career levels to distribute and gauge performance of its workforce. Though specifics might vary between companies, each one has a way to distinguish Junior, Mid and Senior levels. Software engineering firms are no different. These career ladder level definitions are referenced during recurring performance reviews and promotion cycles. They’ll also be referenced during the hiring process to decide candidates level and pay ranges.
Without career ladders, unfair or biased decisions might be made and that only leads to chaos.
Features of Engineering Ladders 🪜
They bring standardization within the firm — A person at “senior” career level is expected to show specific set of behaviors and the same expectations are set for other senior level employees. In other words, the definition of what is to be at “Senior level” is standardized. This helps to maintain uniformity when judging one person’s achievements vs another. Without this, unfair or biased decisions might be made and that only leads to chaos.
They clarify areas of improvement — Without uniform definitions, it’s hard to talk about what you need to work on. This might be in terms of delivering working code to production consistently or writing tests. At each level, the expectation clarifies what needs to be worked on.
Help build your promotion case — If you’re already meeting majority of expectations at your current ladder level, then you can work with your manager on your promotion case. Remember that promotion is always a lagging indicator— which means you need to be showing more of the “next level” behaviors before you can be promoted. A clear engineering ladder can give you structure and behavior definitions to use in your promotion examples.
They cover multiple dimensions of performance— Not only are there expectations to get working code into production, they also talk about stakeholder management, handling complexity/ambiguity in projects and mentorship. These start to become critical the more senior you get. Broadly, these dimensions are divided into Getting Stuff Done(GSD), Impact on System Design and finally Cultural Contributions. Individual Contributors(IC) and People Managers(EM/Dir) will further have different behavioral expectations.
Engineering Ladder might be called something else in your company, but every company has them and it is worth understanding them for knowing where you stand.
Career Web 🕸️
It’s important to understand career ladders at any company, but it doesn’t mean that all careers go straight up or down. I have come across the term ‘Career Web’ many times and it really resonated with me as even my career hasn’t been from point A to point X.
Knowing that your career actually isn’t supposed to be a ladder, it frees you up to try new career avenues and get a broader experience.
From my experience, there have been two experiences that I often reflect on as being challenging, but rewarding.
Switching between Manager & Individual Contributor
For senior candidates, choosing between management track or sticking with Individual Contributor(IC) track is a major career choice. This choice seems like a one-way door — once made, you can never return back. In reality though, you should absolutely try both. You can easily switch between the tracks and each one will give you a different perspective.
With the Manager track, you’ll learn to think about your team and your stakeholders in a different light. With the IC track of Principal or Architecture, you’ll appreciate the depth in technology and project you can get into.
Switching between Industries
Software engineering is one of the few career paths that is applicable in almost every industry.
From finance, to healthcare to government, the problem areas and domains are endless. It’s unlikely to change in the age of AI. So switching industries can actually give you a broader experience and keep you motivated.
Obviously you’ll need to learn more about the new industry and career definitions could be different. But most places have an established knowledge base to learn from and you’d be surprised how much the problem spaces overlap. Like the same engineering concepts and knowledge of building resilient & performant systems is applicable.
Lack of domain expertise could also mean that you start at the same or lower career level. But if you value experience and can afford to wait, you can get back & surpass your current career level.
Would love to know if you have switched domains or careers tracks in comments!
Next in this series we’ll take a look at the specific ladder levels and some of the pitfalls to avoid. We’ll start with initial career level and include — “Going deep vs going wide”, building trust & relationships and following best practices.