Senior management certainly has to be on board, but it's best if your entire engineering department is clear on why creating a career ladder for them is necessary.
3. Start building it with only a few people
Early on you want to start brainstorming ideas with the people who have the most insight into career development, the inner workings of your company, and engineering. You want to put together a reasonable draft.
4. Gather feedback
Once you have at least a rough draft, involve a broader group of people from the company, and get their feedback. Expect to introduce a lot of changes to your first draft.
5. Implement feedback
Basically rinse and repeat points 3-4. until you're ready.
+1 Update it regulary
You may outgrow your career framework, so don't be afraid to update it systematically. Don't do it too often, you want to set concrete goals for your engineers!
Here are some key takeaways from the interview for leveling up engineers:
1. Pair programming is the most effective way to learn. If you want developers to grow quickly, pair them up with a more senior engineer, and it's guaranteed that both people will take away a lot.
2. As an engineering manager you can hand out stretch projects to your developers.
They get an interesting piece of work, and get to see if they want to grow their skills in that direction. You get to see if they show promise for another role.
It's a win-win.
How do you build an open feedback culture like GitHub?
0. Before anything else, you have to know, even if you’re at a small company, you can’t start it early enough. You need to set up a feedback system with a regular cycle.
1. Have everyone do self-reviews
Wherever you are, it can’t hurt to think about what you’ve been doing over the last months. A bit of self-reflection is a great first stage for your feedback system.
1. I use one on ones to give both positive and negative feedback. It's a frequent opportunity to do it. You want your direct reports to always know how they are perceived, rather than only learn about it at performance reviews.
2. You want to avoid giving critical feedback out of the blue. I tend to put a note about the broader topic of my critical feedback in the meeting agenda. It helps them to prepare.
1. Preserve optionality:
Not committing to a single course of action is valuable. Incrementality is a great way to make it work in practice. You set a direction, and set up checkpoints where you can stop, and redirect yourself.
2. Skin in the game:
If your employees can succeed without helping the business, that makes the organization fragile. You need to give them the proper responsibility and proportionate accountability to make them thrive.