So the only way this process is relevant to you is that your manager might want to look good to their manager by demonstrating that they're "developing" your "talent". It's a nice favour to your boss to let them pretend their job isn't totally meaningless in this respect, but I'm in the same boat as you, I couldn't care less about progression.
I feel like making everyone at the lower levels shoulder all of the accountability is the exact opposite of what we need to do when it comes to improving operations across the board.
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 out from other applicants
I was competent though, which is always a requirement; this won’t work for smooth talkers only.
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.
You don’t, actually. People love to be flattered, and the trick is to go find whoever is making the decisions and to flatter them.
You’re not immune to this either. No one is. Again, competence is a requirement, but flattery plus competence is a very powerful way to distinguish yourself.
I don’t hire ticket takers for the most part.
Again, let's not shift all the accountability to the guys lower on the ladder. It's a team effort.
Perhaps I just don't understand your mindset because I do not define myself by my career. Work is just how I exchange some of my time and effort for money so I can focus my life on the things I actually matter to me, so the "weight" of my career is perhaps different than yours. Which is fine, btw. I don't really have any issues if someone wants to make their career their life, but I'll never align with that, especially not at this late in my adult life.
The “team” doesn’t care about you being competitive when you are looking for your next job.
Love your email by the way.
As for the email, it was part of a now-dead idea that grew out of boredom one evening while chatting with some old computer friends, and definitely involved different sounding farts. Never really got past a few lines of code, but I have been thinking about using the domain for a cranky old git blog or something.
Keep in mind, the Art of War can easily be seen as a dummy's guide to product management and is just a default minimum because age managers are often selected by the peter principle.
Sorry you've worked for such terrible companies.
If you’re in a small enough company for your impact to matter, chances are your stock options are still chips, which you might never get to cash in.
If the company is post IPO then chances are your impact will never move the needle materially for yourself.
Income is really the only thing that matters. When you do the same job and aren’t getting inflationary bumps then there’s a serious issue.
I love this and am going to reuse it!
It means you’re failing at some combination of knowing how to delegate, how to communicate trade offs between time, cost and requirements and how to prioritize
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 turn, the senior may only code 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 in something that might take a staff engineer 5 hours.
The problem is that skill acquisition takes time.
I’ve always changed jobs. It’s a lot easier to get a “promotion” as part of an interview when you control the narrative than going through the promo process.
Besides because of salary compression and inversion, even if you do get an internal promotion, you will probably make less than someone coming in at your level.
But I’ll tell you the lack of a framework does not change anything. Then all you get is “in my judgment, you haven’t proven yourself to be senior yet.”
And the result is the same: the person leaves to a place that will appreciate them.
The OP said they don’t care about promotion to the next level they just want to keep getting paid to do the same job.
You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility.
Those aren’t the same thing, even if the way both of you are reacting is with a similar kind of cynical dismissal of the idea that a ‘career framework’ can help you with your needs.
Which is weird because it honestly sounds like both of you are looking for a clear career framework. Either one in OP’s case where it’s clear what ‘coasting’ looks like - meeting expectations for a level year after year and not striving for promotion; or one in your case where it’s very clear to you what you need to do to reach the next level.
You can object to the implementation of the promotion policy under a framework, but your problem is not with the concept of a career framework - if there were no guidance for job levels you would be in an even worse position when it comes to complaining about your promotion prospects.
But you don’t need a “promotion” for that. Even when I was at BigTech, there was nothing stopping me from volunteering for a more impactful project. No one was going to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to do it because of my level.
I had a junior consultant/returning intern that I mentored as an intern and then when they came back over a smaller project that usually would not have gone to someone at their level. They had proven to the department that we could trust them to both do the work and be in front of the customer.
I was there as a backstop if needed. But when we flew fk the customers site, I intentionally stayed in the background and deferred to them.
If I found a job at a higher level that I thought I'd really enjoy and that I'd be good at, I'll be interested, but otherwise I'm content.
I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today. Not that I am rich, far from it, but I am not sure I want to ask my kids for help... and that seems more and more the direction we're moving in.
I shiver at the thought.
Culturally, as a Filipino kid, everyone knows that kids are indebted to the parents for them being born. Wtf.
I do help my parents because I love them, they dont ask but they don't need to.
But I will not ask help from my kids, they dont owe me anything.
We live in the UK now, but my wife and I will just have to retire to the Philippines where everything is a whole lot cheaper.
Then don’t. I’m 50 and my wife (48) spent the last four years “decontenting” our lives. I started working remotely in 2020 and we sold our big house in the burbs (for twice what we had it built for in 2016) after our youngest graduated and downsized to a condo in state tax free Florida. We are now down to one car and our fixed expenses are a nothing burger.
She also “retired” at 44 and spends time on her passion projects. We travel a lot and have done the digital nomad thing for a year flying one way trips across the country. In other words, when I do retire, we will already have cleared most of our bucket list.
Yes I am a “staff” engineer at a smaller company now - equivalent in pay to around what I was making as an l5 (mid level) at BigTech. But with a lot less stress. I have no need to make more money except for inflation adjustments
It depends on the company. A few companies have a terminal level that is approximately equivalent to Dropbox's IC3/IC4. This level does not involve managing people, but it does require owning projects that can span across several teams.
On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.
Career goals? Keep things as they are.
Work is only something I have to do to have a decent life the rest of the time.
Unfortunately it feels very difficult to say that in earshot of one’s employer without being branded some sort of burnout slacker, even though I do work hard and to a high standard.
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.
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.
I'm in a similar boat but I haven't seen any place keep up with inflation without some kind of promotion or bonuses.
I am trying to be this way, as I do personally love the work, but I would like one and maybe two promotions for the improved earnings and additional autonomy it would provide.
If an employer offers this they are up there in employee retention for sure.
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 my family.
I really don’t care “what my impact could look like at the next level”.