Career Ladders

You may agree that naming is everything in the software industry - from variable names to class names, but how about extending the idea to the names of roles? Let’s say you are a “Senior Software Engineer” - great but what does that even mean? Does the name & definition translate across companies? Does everyone think exactly the same thing when they say “Senior Software Engineer”? The answer to almost all these questions is in the negative.

In this case, unfortunately, only naming does not address the problem completely! So when we were growing rapidly as a software engineering organization, we thought about this a bit and decided to attempt defining the roles a bit more concretely. We looked around at what people have done before in this area. We found an excellent video by Marco Rogers (Answers why you need something like this) and Sarah Dresner’s framework (Answers how you can do it), as well as Medium’s Growth Rubrik framework, which is another but a bit more involved example of how to build a career ladder.

One other realization was that, while guidance is good, the role descriptions are not something you simply copy and expect to work. For example, as an open source software focused company, values such as community were essential to our existence. So we wrote our own detailed 2-page descriptions of roles and what it takes to move from one to the other.

We hope you find these useful - but definitely improvise to fit your organization’s needs and goals. We are happy to share more; please feel free to reach out to Vishal. Also, this whole thing is available as a GitHub repo at infracloudio/career-ladders, feel free to use it.