Wikimedia Engineering/Careers/Discussion notes

September 10, 2013 - Continuation of Careers Discussion

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Careers

Possible challenging things // What are the hairy issues we need to talk about?

  • What do things mean (like "Architect")?
  • Are changes in technology reflected in current titles? Back in the day challenges were different (scaling, etc.), now different (mobile, front-end presentation) - do we represent current issues well enough in titles?
  • In Ops, no disambiguation in roles/titles - SRE not used so far (except for postings), just Operations Engineers and Architect; Senior Ops vs. Ops?
    • "Straight-forward" but process needed to evaluate promotions?
  • People aren't here forever - titles should reflect what they did here for their next place (e.g. external market/industry/…)
    • audiences are "each other", "future employers", "larger community", "the government (for visas)", "future employees (sexy/attractive job titles)", others?
  • Titles vs. roles - "Senior Software Engineer" vs. "Features Infrastructure Lead" - you could have both at the same time.
  • No Architect roles (titles?) in Features / front-end
  • What's the path beyond SSE - is "Architect" a promotion? Is it the promotion? What other promotions exist, if any? What if you want to be "Epic Engineer"? (And at the other end - no Associate Software Engineer?)
  • Want to be as flat an organisation as possible - how do we stay flat(ish) with title variance?
  • Could we all just pick our own titles? Or different strokes for different folks?
  • Need for calibration of "Senior" (etc.) between different rank systems (Senior Engineer vs. Senior Designer vs. Senior Product Manager)
  • Do remote people get promoted less often (no, not frequency, we're talking statistically) than people in the office? Is there data?
  • Hard when hiring to have a job title structure that is externally-understandable. (See above re. attractive job titles.)
  • Having a standard for announcing changes? (explaining rationale behind the promotion, for example)

Chat

  • Does anyone care about job titles? They're useless pretty much everywhere, but particularly in non-profits.
    • Part of the proposal is to continue the link between titles and salary bands AIUI. I take it people care about their salaries? ;)
      • So then does "senior" mean anything besides "paid more"?
        • In theory it means "you have this set of qualities that we value and therefore we pay you more", I suppose
    • They do actually mean something (everything?) when you want to move to another org. I've already had people at conferences tell me that my job title is underwhelming when I described what I actually did. It's also important when talking to vendors and you're trying to get donations.
      • If you think your job title means everything when you want to move to another org... you're mistaken. :-)
  • We're not even close to flat...
    • You have no idea how bad it can get. :-)
      • I believe we should be flatter, but that issue is orthogonal to that of titles
        • Should? Could? Will?
  • Re. remote promotions: some of the teams that have very little title diversity are also very strongly remote (e.g. operations), so that might skew things
  • Salary transparency (at least on OfficeWiki)?
    • could cause emotional turmoil!
    • Are paybands on office wiki?
      • Would be good
      • They are for Features Eng :)
        • Where?
          • Sue's safe
          • I guess they're not; other stuff about titles is. The numbers were given to everyone in features eng though, FWIW
            • Helpful. :-)
              • Ask Terry to put them on officewiki then :)
    • If visible outside of WMF, potentially decreases bargaining power for a new job
      • We could put it on office wiki
  • So what is an Architect again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architect_(The_Matrix)


Form 990: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/b5/Form_990_-_FY_11-12_-_Public.pdf

Actions

  • Gayle to get data on remote promotions vs. local promotions
  • Gayle will bring up with Engineering Management that:
    • Streamlined and regular process for announcing hires and promotions/title changes - centralise?
  • Having a mailing list for announcements without reply-all for joins/changes/parts?
    • Just don't reply all! Reply only to the new/leaving person! +1
    • Google+ -1-1
      • Is this an action or a chat? :)
      • Replace hiring/leaving thread
  • Consistency in announcing hires/promotions/role changes
  • Engineering mgmt to flesh out titles/role descriptions
    • Specific focus on architect role to ensure that this is an actual career path that is accessible to people