Update on Software Engineering Career Ladder
jamesshore.com · article · 2024-08-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
Career DevelopmentHands-On Leadership & the PendulumInformal LeadershipPsychological SafetyTeam AutonomyTechnical Leadership Track (IC / Staff-Plus Ladder)
OpenSesame's redesigned career ladder deliberately shifts the organization's definition of engineering seniority away from individual ownership and self-promotion toward teamwork, peer leadership, and manager-verified skill fluency -- trading the old system's clarity and perceived fairness for reduced self-promotion/tenure bias, at the real cost of a heavier, judgment-intensive evaluation burden that falls unevenly on managers depending on how well they already know their people.
practical · expository — A practitioner's progress report: James Shore (VP of Engineering at OpenSesame) reports on rolling out a redesigned career ladder he had previously published, distinguishing what's working from what's still an open question.
Structure
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| Culture Changes: the ladder's shift from individual ownership toward teamwork and peer leadership, with early anecdotal evidence it's working | evidence |
| Manager-Led Evaluation: contrasting the old employee-led spreadsheet system with the new manager-rated fluency scale, and the resulting burden on managers (open verdict) | evidence/qualification |
| Latest Update: the ladder's expansion to Staff Engineer and the three Engineering Manager titles, with the management track's much larger skill count | elaboration |
| Skill-by-skill summary of each title with explicit diffs (added/renamed/moved skills) from the April version | evidence |
Key terms
- fluency (skill rating: None / Learning / Proficient / Fluent)
A four-level per-skill rating, where 'Fluent' means the skill is second nature and exercised whenever appropriate; promotion requires fluency (not merely proficiency) in every skill of a title and all prior titles, with individual skills waivable at a manager's discretion. - player-coach (Technical Lead, Staff Engineer)
A technical-track leadership role whose majority of time is still spent coding and working hands-on alongside team members, distinct from a people-management role; Staff Engineer extends this across multiple teams rather than a single one. - manage the system (vs. managing the work)
Shore's definition of an Engineering Manager's actual job: engineer a system that gives the team the context, skills, resources, and peer leadership it needs to excel without the manager's direct involvement -- not telling people what to do. - leaderful teams / peer leadership
Leadership distributed across team members and expected well before any formal leadership title -- named skills starting at the Software Engineer level (basic facilitation, team steward) and formalized further at Senior Software Engineer (peer leadership) and Technical Lead (leaderful teams).
Propositions
- explicitThe redesigned career ladder deliberately shifts OpenSesame's engineering culture from individual ownership and technology-investigation toward teamwork, peer leadership, and maintainable code, and managers report early behavioral change (more volunteering to lead meetings, take on new work) consistent with that intended shift.conf: high
- explicitMoving evaluation from employee-led (self-selected evidence, scored by managers) to manager-led (managers rate employees across a wide skill set) was intended to reduce the old system's bias toward 'butt in seat' time and self-promotion ability, at the cost of moving the evaluative burden onto managers instead of employees.conf: high
- explicitManager-led evaluation is tolerable, mostly a documentation exercise, for managers who already know their people well, but is genuinely difficult for managers new to a team, who lack the intimate knowledge the evaluation requires and must spend significant extra time acquiring it.conf: highextendsItchy Brain (Still Burning: Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, enterprise developer tools) · p10 — Both describe the same underlying failure mode -- a manager/mentor lacking the bandwidth or tenure-based depth of knowledge needed to do the people-intensive part of their role -- here from evaluation burden on new managers, there from headcount ratios breaking the 1:1 mentorship channel.
- explicitPromotion requires fluency -- not just proficiency -- in every skill associated with a title and all prior titles, making fluency the operative gate for advancement, though individual skills can be waived at managers' discretion.conf: high
- explicitThe old, employee-led system was perceived by employees as relatively fair and clear despite its bias toward self-promotion and tenure, because it rewarded visible, individually-documented effort; whether the new manager-led system will be judged equally or more fair is explicitly unresolved, since engineers have not yet been interviewed about it.conf: high
- explicitLeadership is formally expected well below any formal leadership title: 'peer leadership' and 'leaderful teams' appear as named skills for Senior Software Engineers, and basic facilitation/team-steward skills already appear at the entry-level Software Engineer title, before anyone becomes a Technical Lead.conf: high
- explicitcorroboratedThe Technical Lead role is explicitly defined as 'coding-centric,' with the majority of time spent as a player-coach alongside the team rather than in pure leadership or management activity; the same player-coach framing extends to the newly added Staff Engineer title, which works hands-on with each team in turn rather than managing people.conf: highsupportsStop Just Writing Code. Start Leading Agents: The Staff Engineer’s AI Edge · p1 — Mokhtar's claim that the Staff Engineer leadership skillset (defining outcomes, reducing ambiguity, reviewing work) is becoming more valuable, not less, in the AI era validates Shore's decision -- made for non-AI, culture-change reasons -- to formalize exactly that cross-team, player-coach skillset as a distinct title.extendsThe Future Of Software Engineering · p15 — Shore's own Staff Engineer definition -- spending time with each team in turn, cross-pollinating -- is precisely the heavy human-coordination load that this corpus proposition identifies as crowding out Staff Engineers' effectiveness as agent supervisors, suggesting the ladder's own design may already carry the risk that proposition describes.supports ←Alex Ewerlöf's Post · p1 — Ewerlöf's prescription that Staff should stay hands-on and coding-centric matches a real, structurally-encoded career-ladder design (Technical Lead and Staff Engineer both defined as player-coach, coding-centric roles) rather than being an idiosyncratic personal opinion.
- explicitAn Engineering Manager's job is explicitly defined as engineering a system that gives the team the context, skills, resources, and peer leadership it needs to excel without the manager's direct involvement -- success is measured by the team not needing the manager, not by the manager directing work.conf: high
- explicitcontestedThe new ladder's management track is substantially larger than the equivalent engineering track at comparable levels (78 new skills added across three management titles), formalizing 'managing the system' as a distinct, heavily specified craft parallel to, not subordinate to, the engineering track.conf: highcontradictsSupporting Your Employees' Career Growth When Everyone Is Overwhelmed · p2 — HBR argues the career-ladder model itself is obsolete because careers move sideways as much as upward; Shore is simultaneously investing heavily in building and expanding a detailed, explicitly vertical, title-based ladder (now 100+ skills across nine titles) as the organization's primary tool for engineering career progression.
- implicitSeveral specific skills were deliberately added or reclassified between the April and August versions of the ladder (e.g. 'Assume positive intent' and 'Build quality in' added; 'Grit' renamed 'Persistence'; 'Evaluate complex dependencies' moved up from Senior Software Engineer to Technical Lead; 'Reflective codebase architecture' moved up from Senior Software Engineer to the new Staff Engineer level), indicating the skill list is actively recalibrated based on where each skill is actually exercised, not fixed at first design.conf: medium
Arguments
Shifting career-ladder evaluation from employee-led to manager-led reduces self-promotion and tenure bias, but this benefit is paid for by a large, unevenly distributed burden on managers. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- The old system rewarded 'butt in seat' time and self-promotion ability
- The new system removes the employee's burden of assembling evidence and shifts the evaluative work onto managers, across a much wider skill set
- Managers who already know their people find the work tolerable (mostly documentation); managers new to a team find it genuinely hard because they lack the requisite intimate knowledge
Implicit premises:
- A manager's depth of knowledge about an employee is unevenly distributed across an organization (new managers, reorganized teams), not a fixed baseline competency
- The theory that the burden 'will only be difficult the first time' is itself untested
Inferences:
- An organization adopting manager-led evaluation should expect a transition period of uneven evaluation quality correlated with how long a manager has worked with a given team, not uniformly improved fairness from day one
Formal engineering seniority -- even 'Senior,' and certainly Technical Lead and Staff Engineer -- should be defined primarily around peer leadership and systemic contribution, not around solo technical ownership or novel-technology exploration. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- The previous ladder, which emphasized individual ownership and investigating new technologies, is being explicitly replaced
- 'Peer leadership' and 'leaderful teams' appear as named skills well before any formal leadership title
- Technical Lead and Staff Engineer are defined as player-coach roles whose main currency is working alongside others and cross-pollinating, not managing people or building things solo
Implicit premises:
- The previous ladder's culture-shaping effect (rewarding solo ownership and tech exploration) was judged undesirable enough to warrant a full redesign
- Peer leadership and systemic contribution are things an organization can reliably observe and rate via a skills rubric, even though they are less legible than individually-authored deliverables
Inferences:
- This implies the career ladder itself functions as a deliberate culture-shaping lever, not just a compensation/title mechanism -- the skills an organization chooses to formalize and reward are themselves a behavioral intervention
Narratives
- Managers report seeing shifts in behavior under the new ladder -- people volunteering to lead meetings and take on work they didn't take on before -- and the new ladder has also been usable as a touchstone for addressing performance problems.
→ Supports the proposition that the culture-change goal of the redesign is showing early, if anecdotal, success.
Questions addressed
- ✅ Is the culture-change goal of the new ladder (teamwork and peer leadership over individual ownership) actually working?
So far, yes -- per manager-reported behavior change (more volunteering, more initiative), though the author treats this as early, anecdotal evidence rather than settled proof. - ⭕ Does manager-led evaluation reduce the old system's bias without creating an unacceptable new burden?
Explicitly left open ('jury's still out'): it is tolerable for managers who already know their people, hard for managers who don't, and whether it gets easier over time is an untested theory. - ⭕ Do employees perceive the new, manager-led system as fairer or better than the old, employee-led one?
- ✅ What should an Engineering Manager's job actually consist of, as distinct from an engineer's?
Engineer the system (context, skills, resources, peer leadership) that lets the team excel without the manager's direct involvement -- explicitly not directing day-to-day work. - ⭕ Is a 100+-skill, highly granular evaluation rubric itself usable and bias-resistant at scale, or could its own complexity reproduce a new kind of evaluator bias (e.g., toward managers with more rubric-literacy or more 1:1 time)?
Gaps
- incompleteThe piece names the manager-led evaluation burden as a known cost but gives no account of how much manager time it actually consumes, and no fallback plan if the stated theory -- that the burden 'is only going to be difficult the first time, and then will get easier' -- turns out not to hold.
Read next: A later Shore update or comparable published career-ladder retrospectives reporting measured manager time burden over multiple cycles. - uninformedPublished August 2024, the ladder has no skill addressing AI-assisted development, coding-agent supervision, or AI fluency at any level -- even though the same period's industry discourse was already reframing exactly the skillset the ladder specifies for Staff Engineer and Technical Lead (defining outcomes, reducing ambiguity, mentoring, architectural review, cross-pollination) as increasingly valuable, and increasingly time-starved, specifically because of AI coding agents.
Read next: extract-mokhtar-staff-engineer-leading-agents and extract-the-future-of-software-engineering, which argue this exact Staff Engineer skillset becomes more load-bearing (and more oversubscribed) as teams adopt coding agents. - incompleteThere is no discussion of how skill ratings are verified beyond a single manager's own judgment -- no peer input, no cross-manager calibration process, no appeals mechanism -- despite the explicit goal of reducing bias; if two managers rate the same demonstrated behavior differently, the piece gives no mechanism for catching or correcting that.
Read next: Calibration/peer-review mechanisms in other practitioner career-ladder writeups, or a later Shore follow-up addressing cross-manager consistency.
Related documents
- Supporting Your Employees' Career Growth When Everyone Is Overwhelmed
- Itchy Brain (Still Burning: Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, enterprise developer tools)
- The Future Of Software Engineering
- Stop Just Writing Code. Start Leading Agents: The Staff Engineer’s AI Edge
- The engineering manager role is splitting in two
- Alex Ewerlöf's Post
- 4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki
- 5 Things World-Class Engineers Do That You Don't
- Software Development As Collective Learning With Hazel Weakly
- Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally