Dropbox Engineering

I agree with the majority of the other posters; internal is typically best.

In my experience, usually how this plays out is:

1. Establish yourself has a high performing SSE. You need to build this reputation both on your direct team and department, but ideally across the org broadly.

2. Make it known you wish to become a manager at some point in the future. Have conversations with your direct manager, but also consider having conversations with other managers and leaders in the organization broadly. Ask them how they made the transition and what advice they would have for you.

3. Try to take on as much manager-like responsibilities as you can. This could include:
a. Mentoring and helping onboard new employees
b. Informally overseeing the activities of some employees (interns or junior employees can be a great place to start)
c. Figure out if your organization offers some type of future manager training. Enroll in that.
d. Getting involved with interviewing.
e. Offer to take on special projects outside of your day to day work.

4. At some point when you have done the majority of steps 1-3, sit down with your manager and put together a written plan. Some companies will have great competency models or career frameworks that you can leverage, but many don't. If you fall into the later camp, check out online resources for companies that have published their engineering manager competencies. Use those to inform your plan and cite them in the document.

5. Get agreement from…

I will tell you that “being a good engineer” doesn’t just involve “I codez real gud”, that’s the mark of a mid level engineer at any company that I’m aware of that has real leveling guidelines including my first hand experience at one BigTech company and my second hand experience at another.

Managing organizational complexity and people skills is required.

On a technical level I have always tried to carve out an “epic” or a “workstream” with clear interface boundaries between other work before I became a more senior “architect”

This is Dropbox’s leveling guidelines for instance

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

I mean if you look at the leveling guidelines of every single tech company that I’m aware of, “senior” is defined by “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. They may state it different ways. But it all boils down to this.

You are not a “senior” if you spent 3 years pulling tickets off the board with well defined business goals.

Sources:

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

(The only BigTech company I have worked for)

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-leveling-progress.html

I really like this, the Dropbox career framework, and the Monzo career framework. I synthesized all three recently into one that I keep for our company, and the work pays such dividends. We do quarterly performance reviews and not only does having a consistent standard make these fair, but it reduced my time to write them from 1 hour per report to about 30 min.

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/
https://github.com/monzo/progression-framework

And my nascent adaptation..
https://kevala-progression.herokuapp.com/

This is the framework: https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

- Why do they have 4 SWE levels?

- Why is there no Senior SWE level?

- Why is there no Junior SWE level?

It seems like IC1 = Intern, IC2 = Junior, IC3 = Developer, IC4 = Senior. No idea why they're not named closer to that.

Also, do people think that these role descriptions are actually helpful? I find them extremely vague and generally unhelpful in determining if I'm performing at a particular level.