Whose job ladder is it anyway?

When I talk to engineers who feel stuck in their current roles, one of the first orders of business is pulling up their job ladder and really talking about it. You and your manager should regularly look at your job ladder, make sure you both understand it, and maybe evaluate if there’s a different ladder that you should be on.

Job ladders are a tool for companies to communicate expectations, chart out paths for growth, and give us a standard to help mitigate bias in a performance. Especially if you’re still early in your career, where you might be transitioning from being evaluated on syllabi and test scores, this is as close as you get to that kind of feedback. (More on that in another newsletter.)

What makes a good job ladder?

Not all job ladders are created equal. The more job ladders you read, the more you’ll see the nuance. There are a lot of great resources out there to see examples. I really recommend checking out ones from companies other than your own to see what’s possible.

I’ve read a lot of job ladders, and there are multiple ways to have a good one. The best ones reflect what the company values when it comes to its engineering efforts.

Accountability at all levels. 

Good job ladders have accountability at all levels. You should know what’s your job and what’s not, and you should know when you’re being successful and when you’re not. It’s not so much that you want to be able to say, “That’s not my job” if someone asks you to get them coffee or play secretary in a meeting (that’s a slightly different conversation). It’s more about making sure you know who you can rely on and who is relying on you. Though a job will always be what you make it, it’s important to have expectations on where each position should give and take.

Not A Checklist.

The best job ladders aren’t checklists or overly prescriptive. You ideally want a job ladder that allows people to shine and make a role their own. People have different strengths, and a ladder that’s written too narrowly will limit that. This can make ladders a bit more difficult to consistently evaluate. If you want to do a litmus test to see if your own organization is doing well with not enforcing the checklist and accounting for individualized areas of expertise and nuance, pick a couple engineers who are a level or two above you, but all at the same level so that they all have the same job ladder. How are they similar in their roles? How are they different? Do you think they’d say they’ve been evaluated fairly? Why or why not? This can be a good conversation with your mentor.

Clear progression and timelines 

There are often expectations in junior roles that you won’t be junior forever. Most companies don’t let you stay a junior engineer indefinitely. They consider those initial years as part of their investment in you, and they expect higher ROI as you grow to be a more independent and seasoned engineer who can add more value by tackling larger and more complex projects. I think this is perfectly reasonable, and it’s a very common expectation across many industries.

However, what I don’t like are job ladders that don’t explicitly mention these growth expectations. I think it’s ok if the timeline itself isn’t a hard deadline to allow for life events or exceptional circumstances that might cause someone to be junior for longer than expected, but I’ve talked to many junior engineers who are surprised to find they’re about to lose their jobs because they’re failing a growth expectation that they didn’t know existed. Simply put, if you’re still junior, you might not know without being told that you need to pick up the pace on your growth. Contrast that with leaders who have seen multiple companies running different ladders who think that’s obvious, you’re in for a misunderstanding at some point. A good general manager rule of thumb is that you need to be more prescriptive and explicit the more junior the position is: in job ladders, in work assignments, in feedback. As people gain experience, they also learn where the nuance is and where the boundaries lie. Give them a very solid foundation to start on.

What about engineers optimizing for ladders?

I’ve had engineers ask how leaders keep engineers from "gaming" the job ladder, and I’ll let you in on a secret: OMG y’all, they know. 

Engineering leaders have been around engineers before, and they know if you give engineers a list of constraints and rewards, well… engineers gonna engineer. So that’s why they try to craft ladders very carefully to get the behaviors and culture they want to optimize for.

Eng leaders have to balance all of these trade-offs when drafting a ladder, in a language that’s open to interpretation that might differ slightly based on cultural backgrounds and career experience, and then help a bunch of people who didn’t write the ladder understand and internalize their intention.

So that’s why job ladders are difficult, and why it’s good for your career to spend some time seeking to understand as much as you can about the stick you’re being measured against.

Applying Job Ladders to Your Career

Avoiding Miscommunication Pitfalls

It’s absolutely true that job ladders help us keep a more consistent bar, but they’re not always used perfectly consistently across a company. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “The ladder isn’t a checklist but…” right before another manager was about to try to enforce it as a checklist in a promotion discussion. You have to be able to communicate with your manager on how you shore up skills in one part of the ladder if you’re lacking in another, and why that still makes you an effective engineer. If you’re hitting this roadblock, your manager should spend some time thinking about how to round out your experience (bowing to the checklist), better represent how you’re showing up as a whole, or give you better feedback and both do better interpreting the ladder next time. It’s not always “fair,” but remember your manager is (probably) a human that’s growing and learning and trying their best, too. 

How to use this in promotions

Don’t assume that your managers will draw all the same lines that you do between the ladder and your current work. Like I tell my reports: I care very much about your career. It’s my job to care about your career, and it’s actually one of my favorite parts about my job. I’m also outnumbered. I’m often trying to track 10 people’s careers at once, more if you include mentees, on top of my own, on top of my other work that it takes to keep a team or organization running. I’m going to forget things. I’m going to interpret things differently than you would. Help me help you by engaging in conversations that keep us on the same page. Write the notes. Challenge me on my perspective. Make your own pitches. I’ve been on both sides of this: I’ve talked my own manager into having more confidence in my promotion attempt as well as had my own mind changed when it came to putting a report up for consideration sooner rather than later. (Both promotions were successful.) Being able to center those conversations on the job ladder and getting multiple people to weigh in on the full picture helped everyone feel confident about the decision.

Compare and Contrast Ladders

Look at job ladders other than your own. It’s really helpful to understand the job ladder of folks that you work with. What are they having to prioritize? What are they responsible and accountable for?

I also recommend stacking different ladders next to each other. In a well run organization, you’ll see patterns in level along between ladders when it comes to responsibility and accountability. Learn what it looks like for a mid-level designer to deliver vs a mid-level software engineer vs a mid-level site reliability engineer. Take a highlighter and in one color highlight everything they have in common. Then look at what’s different. How does that factor into how you help each other succeed?

You also might find a job ladder that’s similar to yours in the best ways and consider switching. Though ladders are linear, careers often aren’t. As people explore and grow and change, they might have different goals and aspirations at different times in their careers. I’ve seen engineers jump to a Program Manager ladder after realizing that’s the work she enjoyed and wanted to get better at. She felt her work would get better recognized that way. I’ve also had engineers tell me that if I ever tried to put them on certain ladders, like a management ladder, they would hiss until I retreated. 

Those are USEFUL, actionable conversations that help you get where you want to go faster. If you haven’t spent time with your company’s job ladders, make a point to put it on your next 1:1 with a manager or mentor.