Chapter 15
Dual Ladders

It’s Thursday, you’ve finished work, and you’re sitting in a coffee shop just down the road from the office. Charlie is in town to attend a conference, and you haven’t seen each other since college. Your drinks get placed on the table.

“How’s work going?” you ask. “When we emailed each other a couple of months ago, you said you were working on some pretty interesting sounding streaming APIs.”

“Kinda good and bad,” Charlie replies.

“Why’s that?”

“Well the good news is that I’ve finally managed to get a promotion,” says Charlie, looking down at the table.

“Oh, that’s great! Congratulations!” you reply.

“I’m managing a team now.”

“Even better! Well done. But what’s bad about it?”

“Well,” says Charlie, “I’m not sure if I actually want to be a manager. But it seems to be the only way that you can get promoted without having to wait about ten years.”

“Oh, so what happened?”

“My previous manager left and they didn’t have the budget to hire someone externally, so they promoted me. It all happened really quickly. I don’t think I knew what I was getting into.”

“Have you had a chance to talk to your manager about it? What do they think?”

“Dunno. My manager is in another country now, and I just don’t feel like we get to talk about anything beyond the surface level of what’s going on with our projects.”

You take a sip of your coffee. “That really sucks, I’m sorry. I’m still finding my way in my new job, but I’m always happy to listen.”

“I appreciate that. Thank you. I just don’t know whether I’ve made a choice I can’t back out from. The team seems to like the fact I’m doing the job, but it’s just making me feel like I get nothing done. Work isn’t really fun anymore. I miss building things.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” you reply.

Way back in the ​Introduction​, we stated that there was a management-skills crisis in our industry. Since we have a skills crisis, and since we expect our managers to define career progression for our industry, it could follow that we have a career progression crisis also. The world is full of companies that haven’t defined what our career progression should be, causing all sorts of anti-patterns:

• Good engineers leaving their jobs to get promotions because they were unable to progress at their current company.

• Engineers reluctantly becoming managers to get promotions.

• Managers leaving companies as the solution to being unhappy in their roles.

• Unrealistic expectations on engineers to take on management duties but also produce the same amount of code as they were before.

This chapter aims to address the career progression crisis by helping you build out a progression framework that works for you and your team. Here’s what you’re going to learn:

• How to define the role of individual contributor and what some examples of progression look like on that path in our industry.

• How to do the same for the management track.

With that in mind, we’re going to go through an exercise to create a behaviors grid for both tracks that can act as a framework for staff to discuss their progression in their careers and make reasoned decisions about whether they would like to be individual contributors or managers. We’ll then use these career tracks to debug common career progression problems that you may have already observed during your time in industry.

Creating this career progression framework can be eye-opening for you and your team. It also offers you another opportunity to engage with the wider department and assist in creating one for everyone if it doesn’t already exist. Awesome! That’s another opportunity for you to be impactful and influential outside of your team.

Let’s get going by looking at each of the two tracks in turn. And yes, before you ask, they are separate jobs.