designing a title/level system for a sw org that doesn't suck
Call for feedback from anyone out there who cares (both Jobster-ites and outside), about the possibility of designing a title/level system for a software engineering organization that manages to meet basic organizational goals without trashing the egalitarian ethic that makes a good software team click.
I've always favored the concept of separating titles and levels, keeping the former simple and unadorned (e.g. "Software Developer"), while permitting some finer-grained distinction in the latter (say, like an 8-point scale, with a clustering around levels 3-5). In this scheme, salary would be highly correlated with level, but only loosely correlated with title. This avoids the stupid title inflation that results from the traditional Associate/Senior/Principal/etc. nonsense, and it also holds out the intellectually pleasing possiblity of being an SD-8 (i.e. a regular ol' dev who just happens to have some mad skilz).
I understand that this is roughly similar to the scheme being used by Microsoft, although having never worked there (or anywhere else that used a similar scheme, unfortunately) I'd be interested in hearing from people who have first-hand experience of it. I'm sure there are things that suck about it too, as there are by definition with any such system...
Since Blogger appears to have screwed up the way comments work and I haven't had time to fix my template to accomodate the changes, if you have feedback email me at the address below and I'll summarize the results in a future post.
I've always favored the concept of separating titles and levels, keeping the former simple and unadorned (e.g. "Software Developer"), while permitting some finer-grained distinction in the latter (say, like an 8-point scale, with a clustering around levels 3-5). In this scheme, salary would be highly correlated with level, but only loosely correlated with title. This avoids the stupid title inflation that results from the traditional Associate/Senior/Principal/etc. nonsense, and it also holds out the intellectually pleasing possiblity of being an SD-8 (i.e. a regular ol' dev who just happens to have some mad skilz).
I understand that this is roughly similar to the scheme being used by Microsoft, although having never worked there (or anywhere else that used a similar scheme, unfortunately) I'd be interested in hearing from people who have first-hand experience of it. I'm sure there are things that suck about it too, as there are by definition with any such system...
Since Blogger appears to have screwed up the way comments work and I haven't had time to fix my template to accomodate the changes, if you have feedback email me at the address below and I'll summarize the results in a future post.