Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

by atg_abhishek • 5 years ago

246 149 5 years ago

dropbox.github.io

ZephyrBlu2• 5 years ago

This is the framework: https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

- Why do they have 4 SWE levels?

- Why is there no Senior SWE level?

- Why is there no Junior SWE level?

It seems like IC1 = Intern, IC2 = Junior, IC3 = Developer, IC4 = Senior. No idea why they're not named closer to that.

Also, do people think that these role descriptions are actually helpful? I find them extremely vague and generally unhelpful in determining if I'm performing at a particular level.

desdiv2• 5 years ago

From that page, I'm seeing 7 SWE levels from the sidebar:

- IC1 Software Engineer

- IC2 Software Engineer

- IC3 Software Engineer

- IC4 Software Engineer

- IC5 Staff Software Engineer

- IC6 Principal Software Engineer

- IC7 Sr. Principal Software Engineer

(This is on a desktop browser. Maybe you're only seeing 4 levels because you're on a mobile browser and the rest is cut off. Or maybe you indeed saw 4 levels and the site has been updated since your post.)

ZephyrBlu2• 5 years ago

By SWE I meant literally "Software Engineer", as in IC1-4 Software Engineer compared to Staff, Principal, etc.

Roritharr• 5 years ago

What's the best way to figure out where you are on that scale as an outsider?

oaiey4• 5 years ago

I think they skip naming them because junior is a bit insulting and senior is pointless when you have three more seniority level above it. Also people are very fluent in this range. They develop in this range quickly. A very young person can reach seniority quite fast.

rhizome• 5 years ago

"Junior" is only insulting when the company doesn't promote from within. Which is most online companies, sure, but that's no reason not to buck the conventions.

chris11• 5 years ago

Levels aren't standardized in industry, but they are inside a company. They impact pay bands and other things.

IC1 sounds like it's for new grads. Junior doesn't seem to be a popular title in the bay area. One or two are probably Senior levels.

I find it useful for how they change. Work complexity grows, timelines go from some tasks to multi-year projects, and you are expected to work more outside your team and mentor engineers.

It doesn't really give you a path to get promoted though.

sdfdsfdsfdfd• 5 years ago

IC1 = new grad/little experience

IC2 = mid-tier (usually 2-5 yoe)

IC3 = senior (usually minimum of 5 yoe (this maps to L5 at google))

IC4 = senior/tech lead

...

levels.fyi is also helpful for comparing with other companies.

dannyw3• 5 years ago

helpful but I certainly hope levels are based on individual skills and not just years of experience!

tuckfrump666• 5 years ago

Come up with some BS and then show the world how awesome your BS is.

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

Tried to read a few sentences of their framework but it reads like any other.

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

Some HR person or HR consultant had to justify their existence with this...

qbasic_forever4• 5 years ago

Welcome to the publicly traded company club.

systemvoltage3• 5 years ago

Instant turn-off: Decorative cute emojis in a serious document.

slashdot2008• 5 years ago

it would be nice if it were a PDF I could download and save for later.

is there any way to turn a series of pages in to a PDF? like a recursive wget and then pipe through pandoc?

seanhunter• 5 years ago

Lots of ways to do this, but one way is install poppler-utils so you get pdfunite, make sure your filenames for the pages lexicographically sort in the order you want the pages to end up[1], then do

    pdfunite page*.pdf output.pdf

I have had decent results using pdftk as well to do pdf surgery so that's another option.

In this case, if you do a recursive wget I think it should "just work" because the files are named in a friendly way.

So, putting it all together:

     wget -r 'https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/overview.html'
     cd dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework
     ls ic*software*.html | sed 's/.html$//' | while read f ; do
          pandoc --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf $f.html -o $f.pdf
     done
    pdfunite ic*.pdf output.pdf

[1] ie the ordering of the output of "ls" is the order you want the pages in the output pdf

liketochill• 5 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted, I save everything I want to refer to again as pdf because stuff on the web disappears. I can search all the pdf I have offline with Qiqqa or mendeley. Used to use google desktop for pdf search.

zaptheimpaler• 5 years ago

Check out https://archivebox.io/ for a great self hosted solution. Its one of the best such programs I've found.

You can hack together some scripts to do the basics yourself, but archiving arbitrary pages is pretty difficult to get right.

qbasic_forever4• 5 years ago

Print to PDF, most browsers support it natively if your OS doesn't already.

johntash• 5 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't print pages recursively

mahalol• 5 years ago

A bit more manual, but I've been saving webpages I like in Obsidian.

First, click the reader view in Firefox, then select all, then paste it into a new Obsidian page. It's really good at keeping a nice formatting and importing pictures etc. You can then export the result to PDF if so desired.

rancar2• 5 years ago

Does anyone at Dropbox past or present want to weigh in on the usefulness of this framework and its application with more context? The original post falls a bit short knowing where and how this is being applied inside the org.

nickm122• 5 years ago

I'm a former Dropbox employee, current Amazon employee. I find these frameworks very useful, especially as I've gotten more senior and been involved in hiring, performance reviews, and promotion assessments. Without this kind of framework, it's really up to individual whims about whether someone is performing well. And yes, these frameworks aren't perfect, but the act of creating and maintaining them is healthy for the organization to understand what it values.

jedberg2• 5 years ago

Curiously they don't have a level 7 for Security and Machine Learning.

oaiey4• 5 years ago

I am pretty sure they expect a IC6 or IC7 to handle that. Same for quality and reliability.

jedberg2• 5 years ago

But Reliability has its own level 7.

mromanuk• 5 years ago

“Allow me to introduce you to this awesome bureaucracy we created and designed by committee, all expressed as a PR approved by top execs.”

nine_zeros• 5 years ago

Rofl. The more time I spend in this industry, the more I have come to accept that it is filled with roles without any meaningful output.

People in these roles end up creating bureaucracy (but only for others) as a way to justify their job.

trilinearnz2• 5 years ago

I also got the feeling there was some role justification going on here, with the level of detail employed (and what seems at first glance to be relatively arbitrary levels of skill differentiation). It reminded me a little of the SFIA Framework in that regard.

mars4rp• 5 years ago

You are really going to like the book "bulshit jobs"

Graffur2• 5 years ago

What jobs should I look for to avoid this stuff?

ergocoder• 5 years ago

You'd bet the person who wrote this will use this it in their performance review as a part of the "leadership" aspect. Might be promoted as well.

It's very typical to have a blog-driven performance review.

trilinearnz2• 5 years ago

Whilst I applaud this effort in transparency, I can't help feeling like there is a lot of weirdly specific prescriptive expectations and jargon in place here, with questionable practicality.

I wonder if a looser, more broadly-defined set of definitions might work better, recognising that people can add value in different ways.

echelon• 5 years ago

This is extremely close to the leveling rubric we use at the tech company I work at. The level names and language are slightly different, but it's the same matrices of scope and impact, and more or less the same qualifications.

I assume at this point there's so much cross-pollination going on between tech companies that many companies resemble one another operationally.

This must be a new local maxima that everybody is trending towards.

ardit33• 5 years ago

It is nothing new. It is similar since way back to MSFT times in the 90s and then google changed things a bit in the early 2000s.

Heck, I worked at a stogy financial company way back in 2003, (Fidelity), and had similar grades for engineering (4 grades), then Director, or VP for the highest level.

The Dropbox post would have been much more interesting if it had salary ranges attached to it. Otherwise it is just kinda fluff.

mturmon• 5 years ago

My own institution, a government lab, uses the same naming system (IC1 through IC6) with management also done similarly to what is shown here (M3-M6 at least, not sure about M7). And ICs are slotted into certain disciplines just as here (e.g., for us, Mechanical vs. Optical engineers).

And also with the same matrices. The framework is just the same, with the same griping about the language being slippery among those who use it ;-).

It was converted into the number/matrix setup from the earlier system with Senior, etc., some years ago.

jmgao• 5 years ago

If anyone at Dropbox is reading this, https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ and https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/overview.html have the same content, but the page title is different. (My guess is that all of the pages should be labeled as Dropbox Engineering Career Framework?)

murderfs• 5 years ago

I'm vaguely amused that IC4 and above don't have to "practice the Dropbox Diversity Commitments on a regular basis".

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Use Go AND Rust in the same project.

kaidon• 5 years ago

Not like this... not like this!

creshal• 5 years ago

Meanwhile interns and junior developers apparently have to handle the bulk of hiring and job interview work. No wonder people complain about the quality of job interviews.

effingwewt• 5 years ago

That seems so weird and makes sense at the same time. As in, why would they force juniors into that, and now I understand why some interviews make no freaking sense whatsoever, or the offer is way outside the scope of the position interviewed for.

usaar333• 5 years ago

Wasn't true at all in my days at Dropbox. Seniors not only were interviewing; they were building the interview process.

xyst• 5 years ago

Why are companies adopting this “IC#” nomenclature? What does “IC” even stand for?

I guess it’s a Google or MS thing, or perhaps a modification of US government pay grades (GS-1, GS-2, …)

zodiac• 5 years ago

IC = individual contributor (as opposed to manager, etc)

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

How does that work with the industry standard increasingly being that levels Senior and higher are really management in disguise (with all the responsibility, little of the authority)?

mathattack• 5 years ago

Individual Contributor. (No direct reports)

astrange4• 5 years ago

Individual Contributor aka not a manager.

davidhunter• 5 years ago

Is there an alternative to heavy bureaucracy like this once a company reaches a certain size?

What other mechanisms exist for combatting nepotism, feeling too abstracted from the mission etc in a larger company?

Does a company like SpaceX with lots of people working towards big clear goals and where comp isn’t in the set of top reasons for choosing to work there use a levelling framework like this?

I work in a company of 10 where we all have strong drive towards the company goals. I’m worried that we will lose this as we grow but I can’t see any clear alternatives. I wonder whether you could build a company that operates like a loosely-coupled network of smaller teams with internal accounting so that teams are compensated based on some kind of internal team valuation (similar to how startup valuations are set by the ‘market’). Probably a terrible idea!

qbasic_forever4• 5 years ago

The military--a completely flat structure of promotion based primarily on tenure and time-served, not necessarily ability or award/recognition. Before you blow it off as worthless there is some potential merit to it as it cuts out nepotism, cronyism, and other kinds of corruption that push unqualified people up the ranks.

void_mint• 5 years ago

and other kinds of corruption that push unqualified people up the ranks.

If the metric used for promotion is time served, in what way is that stopping unqualified people from being pushed up the ranks?

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

The military--a completely flat structure of promotion based primarily on tenure and time-served, not necessarily ability or award/recognition.

That's...not how the military works at all. I suppose it might appear approximately that way if you look only at the officer corps and, within that corps, only at survivors of the up-or-out policy. But, while their are minimum time bounds, subjective assessment of fitness (i.e., demonstrated ability) is the main key to selection for promotion.

khuey• 5 years ago

In the military it's also paired with an up-or-out system that discharges (what are judged to be) mediocre officers.

lcw• 5 years ago

The military is not that much different from the private sector. The first few ranks are as you say, but after that you can be fast tracked by nepotism, and cronyism.

hytdstd• 5 years ago

This is impossible to avoid if you want to raise money. Investors and board members insist on this stuff.

dannyw3• 5 years ago

fortunately not every company needs to raise money; nor is raising money even arguably a good thing if your objective isn't to maximise money.

laurent92• 5 years ago

Is there an alternative to heavy bureaucracy like this once a company reaches a certain size?

Richard Brandson famously limited each of his companies to 50 employees. I’d like to hear how it went.

Griffinsauce• 5 years ago

Is there an alternative to heavy bureaucracy like this once a company reaches a certain size?
What other mechanisms exist for combatting nepotism, feeling too abstracted from the mission etc in a larger company?

Assuming that this solves those things at all, I'm not so sure.

tcmb• 5 years ago

Small self-organized teams, a la Frederic Laloux's 'Reinventing Organizations'. https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

afarrell• 5 years ago

One alternative is an opaque hierarchy where it is difficult to find the goals or team missions documented anywhere.

It lets senior management avoid uncomfortable conversations about power relations while also creating a lack of clarity for individual contributors about what their subteam’s mission even is.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

jonathankoren3• 5 years ago

I literally had a interview with a company that insisted on ICs not having levels, while having levels for management. The director was wrapping up and said that the company took growth seriously and specifically mentioned promotions as a reward, to which I immediately pointed out that doesn’t exist for ICs. He then stammered some claptrap about ICs need to find warm fuzzies for themselves, and not worry about recognition.

Lolz

pm904• 5 years ago

It’s a hard problem. Honestly, I think it’s something you can just ask your team about and see what they say. The people that work with you now might help you discover what it is about the job that they love and is keeping them here and try to build on that.

cperciva2• 5 years ago

This would be far more interesting if it included the salary range for each level. If you're going to be transparent, why not be transparent?

whymauri2• 5 years ago

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Dropbox,Google,Facebook,Micr...

cperciva2• 5 years ago

"Values reported by employees over the past few years" is very different from "ranges used internally by employer today". In particular, levels.fyi can be very out of date.

adamredwoods• 5 years ago

Why are QA Engineers not defined as software engineers?

draw_down• 5 years ago

It’s a different job, of course.

phonebucket• 5 years ago

My personal experience of almost all such frameworks is that their very existence drives competition for promotions. In turn, that can lead to (unspoken) resentment of one’s peers.

But once such frameworks are introduced, they are difficult to get rid of.

Consequently, I see the introduction of these frameworks as a committal culture step which should not be taken lightly.

heisenbit• 5 years ago

Does this truly help to attract and retain talent?

pm904• 5 years ago

Probably not, but I appreciate their transparency and the discussion it’s prompting.

aetherspawn• 5 years ago

Speaking frankly, I have been through the different roles and levels and I don't see the point of it all.

There's really only 3 non-exec roles in a software company, only 2 of them cut code, and one is just a placeholder for the junior devs.

Want to know how to keep people? Give them a little pay rise every 6 months and let them own a part of the product instead of having a no-responsibility JIRA burn and churn roster.

aeternum2• 5 years ago

Give them a little pay rise every 6 months and let them own a part of the product instead of having a no-responsibility JIRA burn and churn roster.

This works for most people, but some are hyper-focused on comp and will ask every few weeks about why they're not leveling up and making more.

z3ncyberpunk• 5 years ago

A raise every few weeks, the entitlement..

RussianCow• 5 years ago

Every few weeks?! You almost certainly don't want this person. Even if you provide that, engineers who are this comp-driven will inevitably switch jobs if they get an offer that's remotely better, so you're unlikely to retain them for very long in any case.

blowski9• 5 years ago

Those techniques assume that everybody’s motivations are the same, and that’s not true. Some people don’t want ownership. Others are already satisfied by their pay.

My answer to that question would be three parts:

1. Make sure that you agree on what success looks like, at the micro and macro levels.

2. Discuss what that person needs to achieve success for both of you - mentoring, training, tooling, access, time, money, whatever.

3. Frequently make sure they actually have what they need.

When people are regularly missing out on what you call success, you’ll probably get rid of them. When they’re missing out on what they call success, they’ll get rid of you by leaving. Don’t assume you’ve understood what they think success looks like until you’ve really discussed it with them individually.

ramraj07• 5 years ago

Wait, if you don’t want either product ownership (ergo responsibility outside of coding) or higher pay, what exactly do you want?

erhk• 5 years ago

Others are already satisfied by their pay. Inflation

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

If you want people who want ownership, don't hire people who don't want ownership. Not very complicated. Maybe hard to execute on though.

golergka3• 5 years ago

Give them a little pay rise every 6 months

Everyone gets the same raise as long as they aren't obviously failing? A lot of people who have a more competitive personality would be completely demotivated by something like that.

remuskaos2• 5 years ago

I feel people who need to be above others, in pay and output, can be verz detrimental to a work environment. Yes, as long as a person contributes to a company functioning, they should be part of its success. And that means getting a raise simply for keeping things running.

I feel the urge to constantly outdo oneself and everybody else tends to burn people out (it has burned out me), and innovation or change just to complete a checkmark on a CV can lead to unnecessary and abandoned projects. Like it happens a lot at Google for example.

lunatuna• 5 years ago

Is this a ploy to have me open a new tab per link? Does dropbox get some type of remuneration if I get to 10 tabs?

my_usernam3• 5 years ago

Does anyone else have an existential crises every time they are shown the corporate ladder structure?

Also this looks pretty on par with the companies I've worked for.

aeternum2• 5 years ago

For some reason putting everything in first person makes it even more condescending.

dang• 5 years ago

We changed the URL from https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/sharing-our-engineering-..., which points to this.

nthngtshr• 5 years ago

I've never worked at a big company and my immediate reaction is that I don't like this. It feels like most HN commentators share this kind of sentiment.

I'm genuinely wondering what people on the other side of this debate think about this. If you like having systems like this in your organization, what is it that you like about it?

I feel like in my case it would totally discourage me from actually trying to make the company do better and instead would make me focus too much on trying to please people who rate me on these criteria. But I guess maybe that happens in a large organization anyways. And I guess in that case it's nice to have at least some (albeit not perfect) set of rules. Is that kind of the idea for having these?

blowski9• 5 years ago

Big companies have to put these kinds of frameworks in place to ensure they’re treating everyone equally. Otherwise you end up with the absurd situations of two different people being rewarded differently despite performing the same job equally well merely because they have a different manager.

The downside is everyone becomes a cog in the machine, with nobody being treated like an individual with their own strengths, weaknesses, needs, fears, and aspirations.

jonathankoren3• 5 years ago

The downside is everyone becomes a cog in the machine, with nobody being treated like an individual with their own strengths, weaknesses, needs, fears, and aspirations.

Being treated as a fungible human resource is as much a corporate culture issue, as it is a management issue. The creation of explicit levels and expectations is immaterial here. I’d argue the lack of levels, removes rewards and further dehumanizes individuals by literally treating them all the same.

systemvoltage3• 5 years ago

The language here is so imprecise that if someone had intentions to treat someone unequally, they’ll do that anyways whether they have a framework in place or not.

This is just a bunch of corporate malarkey, let’s be brutally nakedly honest here. The fact is that this is just a more SV version of corporate bullshit with emojis - same exact thing you find in an old corporation like GE or IBM, just dressed up differently.

hellisothers• 5 years ago

Everybody is not being treated the same, there are ~20 criteria listed for SWE and you can have any of them be strengths or weaknesses! Everybody is unique-ish and established criteria allow a good balance between uniqueness and fairness.

pm904• 5 years ago

You’re absolutely right. The most likely thing to happen is that a clueless middle manager will look at these criteria and ask their reports to justify, point by point how they’re achieving or not achieving the different things listed in these criteria and if they’re not how they can “improve”. It’s a supremely shitty way to chart out ones career growth. It’s going to lead to sooo many copycat “we do our career ladder like Dropbox so we must be just as good” clones.

On the other hand, I’m also somewhat glad that this shit is in published form and not some secondhand version pieced together by ex Dropboxers. I personally liked that it lays out what kind of a developer they expect at different levels.

I guess what I’m saying is that I like this as a guide rather than as a rule.

notmeatall• 5 years ago

I work at a big'ish company with a system like this. They also started doing Scaled Agile for Enterprise (SaFe) after I started here, which is just straight up waterfall disguised in agile speak. I feel like a cog and I feel my soul draining away. I've given myself a deadline until August to quit.

Graffur2• 5 years ago

I have only worked at one big company so I am used to these type of job profiles. I dislike them though.

What is it like working at a smaller company? I would love to except I imagine the pay would be worse (in my country - non USA)

jokethrowaway• 5 years ago

The people on the other side of the debate are the ones creating these sort of frameworks.

I can understand this is a reasonable response when you're given the task of evaluating people and pay them accordingly.

Still, this is exactly the reason I hate being an employee. I don't think the employee model is really good, in general.

In the end the role title is meaningless and if a contributor doing good work threatens to leave, it's usually cheaper to bump his pay than to pay for a recruiter's fee, interviewing, onboarding and risk of bad hires.

This doesn't work with weird hiring rules in crazy places (Eg. Amazon's expectation of firing a certain number of people).

AYBABTME• 5 years ago

I was at a unicorn that didn't have any career level/framework and was growing fast. _Many_ engineers and ICs were asking management to add such a framework. In other cases, other employees were complaining that "titles actually do matter", claiming that the lack of rank or title was hurting their future prospects (which wasn't wrong, for better or worse). A good amount of hires refused offers because their title didn't match their prior roles. And then when a title was made for them, the title became an informal career ladder within the org. And then comparisons were made and requests to be ranked similarly made.

So strangely, it was the employees that requested and pushed for this. Personally, back then I was not interested in the whole thing. Still not that into it, but I'd be more on the fence.

makeitdouble• 5 years ago

The alternative is to have a set of managers write prose about how good or not their people are, make vague proposal for raises, to have them approved or not depending on how liked they are by their own managers.

It more or less works, but getting a raise/bonus or not just feels like playing blind bingo most of the time. I once had a manager explain that regardless of the actual project results, because the product people felt stressed and unsure of delivery he wouldn’t give good ratings to the team members. Fighting it back we were just told that he was the one in charge of the criteria.

Career frameworks are vague and there’s still tons of politics in applying it, but at least you have a fighting chance to argue about what you were expected to do, what you did, and about how much you should receive accordingly (these levels are usually associated with salary/bonus scales)

PS: to address the obvious point, if one is constantly fighting, leaving for a better place is the best option, but in a large enough company you could instead change manager. Having a grid setting where you stand in the org also help these horizontal moves.

UncleMeat• 5 years ago

I'm genuinely wondering what people on the other side of this debate think about this. If you like having systems like this in your organization, what is it that you like about it?

I like it. There are limitations and the frameworks can be misaligned with the ideal goals, but in general it provides the following benefits.

1. You aren't completely at the whim of your manager. Managers need to actually document what you did and why that aligns with whatever level on these frameworks. Other managers can provide oversight on this. The alternative is that career success is 100% opaque and based on the feelings of one person.

2. It helps me as a manager do performance evaluations. I'm glad to have a framework than to just go based on my feelings, because my feelings are often wrong.

3. It can help shift priorities for an organization that is working on the wrong stuff. This is hard and requires careful language and training, but in an ideal world these sorts of frameworks allow people to align their personal career goals with the goals of the company.

If you can make the company do better without pleasing the framework, then the framework may be wrong or perhaps your priorities are wrong. I've seen the latter plenty of times. Somebody insists that their work is just obviously impactful and therefore they don't need to measure anything but they are forced to measure it due to framework requirements and, surprise surprise, what they did wasn't that important after all.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

You aren't completely at the whim of your manager. Managers need to actually document what you did and why that aligns with whatever level on these frameworks. Other managers can provide oversight on this. The alternative is that career success is 100% opaque and based on the feelings of one person.

This is the biggest important part. When your compensation, access to good projects, and career growth depend entirely on your manager, and you are not in the "in group," it's worse than demotivating--it's a feeling of hopelessness. You can document everything you did as evidence and none of it matters because your manager just doesn't like you. If you're lucky, you're at a company that encourages moving around and you can hope to luck into a better manager, because that's your only way out of the prison.

EDIT:

Unlike most of the commenters here, I love these written ladders, and I sincerely wish more companies did them. I would seriously favor companies that had written ladders over companies where it's hidden mysticism. When you are a "ladder climber" work personality, it is imperative that you can actually comprehend the actual requirements for getting to the next level--otherwise, how do you do get there? Guessing? When promotion happens at your manager's whim, it seems to have less to do with your work output and more to do with how well you brown nosed and smooth talked.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

I’ve worked on building these systems for our company. I don’t think they’re perfect by any means, but once you have more than about 20 people their presence is better than their absence, especially at the first three levels in the hierarchy (where there is broad commonality in contributions and expectations at the first two levels, with individual variation of course).

When people (often terrible leaders) try to distill the framework into a checklist of activities, things tend to go quite badly.

jeffyang• 5 years ago

I have things I like and things I don't like about it.

I like it because I see it as a guide that helps people understand how to grow and also a framework for fair compensation.

Without guidance many people, especially early in their career, will not grow as fast as they want to grow. They will need to find other ways to get this guidance, such as a good mentor. Some people learn better with a mentor, some people learn better with a framework.

Without a compensation framework, it's hard to reason about whether people are fairly compensated across the board. So what happens is that people start to develop these anyways. If not done explicitly that means that everyone has to independently do the work of coming up with their own framework and then everyone ends up with different frameworks, resulting in things being less fair. A shared understanding and a shared language can be really helpful.

I don't like it because I feel like it will inevitably change from guidance to a checklist. And then it gets political and competitive. Just like you said, people definitely start focusing on the rating. A lot. I think there could be ways to combat this, but I think it's a difficult problem.

I think no matter what you implement, there's a tradeoff. For example, my current thought is that I want it to be more about guidance and less about compensation. So it's guidance on where to grow (if you aren't sure) and de-emphasize the compensation part. How do you do that? I think you basically need to make the guidance more general and then tailor it to a person. Therefore the guidance will be more hand wavy so you sacrifice some fairness. By de-emphasizing compensation, you'd probably also be making people who thrive on promotions and leveling up less happy.

I would honestly love to hear people's thoughts on this as I'm thinking about defining levels in the next few months.

rdm_blackhole• 5 years ago

IC7 => I transcend organizational boundaries by taking a holistic view of the company’s goals and taking responsibility across EPD, not just within my immediate scope of ownership.

I laughed when I read this description. The religious undertone tells me everything that I need to know about the company. Almost cult like?

Just my impression.

anamazingday• 5 years ago

"religious undertone" uhh

holistic (adj.) from holism ... 1926... from Greek holos "whole" (from PIE root *sol- "whole, well-kept") + -ism.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/holism

HN comments are reaching new levels of bad, there's literally nothing fishy about that professional goal and it's what you should be aiming for as a principal dev.

Terretta• 5 years ago

transcendent comment

Synonyms: metaphysical, otherworldly, paranormal, preternatural, supernatural, transcendental, unearthly

jonathankoren3• 5 years ago

This is getting a lot of hate here, but having a well defined career track is useful. So many people want to know what they need to do to advance in their career, yet for some reason think all they need to do is be good at closing tickets. Well, that’s not job at the upper levels. Yes, you do need an opportunity to demonstrate the skills, but it’s surprising how many people in my experience don’t understand that the job changes.

“Oh! But we have a flat organization”, you (cough Netflix cough) say. No you don’t. You have a shadow hierarchy. It’s there. The rubrics still exist. The “politics” and hurt feelings still exist. It’s just that the reasons are kept hidden, perhaps to make promotions more arbitrary and capricious. Does having an actual career make promotions and performance reviews objective? Of course not. Does it make promotions and performance reviews more aligned across the company? Yeah it does.

This is as much a tool for management, as it is for ICs.

iamgopal• 5 years ago

How about out of league ( on either side ) actors ? Is quantisation helpful ?

dikei2• 5 years ago

> This framework is not a promotion checklist for your role

I hope this is true. There were too many times where things started out as a general guideline but gradually turned into a rigid checklist where one must tick all the boxes to get a promotion/raise.

pm904• 5 years ago

Even though they mention that explicitly there will be managers who will interpret it as a checklist.

jayp1418• 5 years ago

Dropbox still doesn't have proper Linux client.

RPeres• 5 years ago

There are a lot of comments being against frameworks like this, as a manager, after having a quick glance, it's a pretty decent one compared to other things I have seen. It's important to note a couple of things, before we even look at the framework itself.

Different people want different things. A lot of people want to code and to be left alone. A lot of other people don't. They want to feel they are progressing towards something. Good frameworks usually state: we consider you as a senior if you are doing X & Y consistently. This helps people aligning their actions/work with a level. The group of people that usually don't care about this things, might start doing so, when their title (e.g. "Software Engineer") lacks the "senior" keyword and they are applying for a senior role elsewhere. This might seem nitpicking, but you would be surprised how many people don't even pass the first screening because they don't have the "senior" prefix. In bigger companies monetary compensation is assigned according to the person's level. In smaller companies, not so much. Everyone has the same title, and people can have significantly different salaries. A good career framework makes it very clear to everyone that if you want to earn between X and Y you need to be at a particular level.

As for the framework itself, I am big fan of giving examples. Say for instance on IC3: "I’m able to navigate ambiguity and remain resilient through ups and downs". I would love if they assigned a somewhat real example: "I am able to complete tasks, even when the acceptance criteria is not 100% clear.". They did well with the separation of the different functions: QA, Software Eng, Security Eng & Reliability Eng. A lot of places bundle some of these together and leave people scratching their head.

johbjo• 5 years ago

It's not intended to be read as instructions on how to be promoted. It is directed as much to managers and higher levels so they understand the boundaries and expectations.

One basic idea; a) recognition of level based on observed impact, as opposed to b) promotion to power as reward for effort/loyalty. With a), management is not a "final destination" of engineering careers. Old/sloppy organizations seem to devolve into b).

The instructions here seem to be written with this in mind, and directed to everyone in the org.

tylerrobinson• 5 years ago

At what point do we hit “peak emoji”? This document isn't describing summer jobs at the local park. It’s adults’ livelihoods. I can’t imagine referring to section trophy subsection rainbow in a serious discussion about my family’s source of income.

nickm122• 5 years ago

Emojis and memes are a big part of Dropbox culture.

mmacvicarprett• 5 years ago

Nice page, quite generic. My experience is that in practice such frameworks do not help much.

c4wrd• 5 years ago

One thing that I think many are missing in their understanding, is that this gives Junior to Mid-level engineers a path forward and direction to improve. Often it's the case an engineer will ask their manager "How can I improve or get to the next level?" and having reference documentation for how to impact an organization at a larger level is extremely handy. It also helps engineers relate their efforts to the bigger picture and help them formulate a vision for why we have a competency hierarchy and how to view it in terms of career frame-working.

At my company we also have a very similar engineering career framework, but the goal isn't to push everyone into boxes, but rather to help engineers understand what it means to have a large impact on an organization. This usually translates to more cross-team responsibilities and deliverables over longer periods of time.

stunt• 5 years ago

Honest trailer: “Dropbox HR team created an Engineering Career Framework, while they barely done any engineering work themselves”

Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

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