I wrote a blog post on what I think it means to be a distinguished engineer or technical fellow. https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/defining-a-distinguished-enginner/ …
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Replying to @jessfraz
Great post! I wrote this some time ago and I need to tweak it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-meditations-promotions-dangerous-anarchists-colm-maccárthaigh/ … Point 5 is my "solution" to the dipshit problem. If there are dipshits, and subjectively there will be, then that makes levels-as-ranks bullshit, so decide for yourself what level to be at..
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“do we really even need any of it? (answer: yes)” - I’m not convinced job levels are needed, in either big or small companies. We were 11 ppl in my last team at Amazon (4 L6, 5 L5, 2 L4) and I’m pretty certain our work wouldn’t have been any different if job levels didn’t exist.
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Replying to @dvassallo @jessfraz
I felt the same and dug into this! I spoke to people who were at Amazon when levels were introduced, people who work at Valve which is famously "flat", and to HR people at Zappos when they introduced the holocracy. I'll try to summarise what I found ...
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no-one who'd been around a long time, or was s-team level, seemed to particularly tied to the level system. After all they were fine with the Zappos upheaval, and there've been lots of (careful) experiments in the hiring and promotions processes. It's not institutional.
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but I found out over and over from HR that it's really really hard to get employment visas or to fire people for non-performance, if you don't have very clear written down requirements and expectations for job roles.
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Counter example from Netflix (note I left 5yrs ago), they didn’t have levels (everyone was senior engineer and the salary band was extremely wide), and it was much easier and quicker to have someone leave, than at Amazon. No-fault needed, wrong fit for the team was enough.
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Similar at my last job and I love the egalitarianism, maturity and just simple adult reality of the baseball style; but I can't imagine it working at a company that brings in thousands of college hires and trains and professionalizes them, or thousands of visa holders.
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Yes, Netflix optimized for not having junior people around.
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Which makes that style of management easy, but puts the onus, and risk, in developing staff elsewhere. The greatest thing an engineer, or anyone, can do is help develop others to reach and exceed their own achievements. Everyone has to start and learn somewhere.
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Maybe it's less noble, but managing only senior folks is its own different kind of hard! Gaining and keeping their respect, and helping and pushing already proven experts to grow in their neglected areas ... it's a whole other kind of hard.
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Totally get that, but I also think very senior people learn a lot in developing others. It’s a two way process.
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Yes, those of us at Netflix with 30+ years of experience spent a lot of time helping those with 5-10 years, and learning from each other.
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