What can you offer as a manager to Software Engineers that will last?
By: Iván Hernández
Tags: Engineering Mangement, Ontruck, Career Development, Software Engineering, Management

Career Development Plans as the most powerful tool to help Software Engineers grow

Software Engineers are highly demanded positions in today’s market but only highly qualified profiles can really choose the company to work on.

We are more and more in a technology-oriented world which ends up in a healthy marketplace for all tech-related positions, but -at the same time- there are huge differences between the professionals who do constant learning to be up to date so they stand out from their peers, compared to the ones that don’t invest much on building their career.

In general -as Software Engineers- it is easy to choose a company to work with relatively good conditions and stability. That’s for sure a great thing but it has some drawbacks, one is perhaps you are not investing enough in your development and you are a bit stuck doing the same things for quite a long time. So, probably you are not moving from your comfort zone and this is something to avoid if you want to build a remarkable career.

On the other side, as a company, there is a fierce market out there that can offer higher salaries and outstanding conditions. So what is the key for the people to decide to stay in the company or to move to another one? In my opinion, after managing people for +14y and now, as VP Engineering at Ontruck, the most valuable thing you can offer as a company to retain talent is a challenging, consistent and trustable Career Development Plan.

For sure, salaries and conditions are important and work at a reputed company with good leaders and a profitable business plan is highly desirable but -at an individual level for the long term- what it will make the difference is the ability to build a solid career.

At Ontruck we have been working for more than a year on building exactly this, inspired by companies as Spotify, Google, CircleCI and others, we built our own model based on two pillars:

Technical Ladder

Career Development Plan Process (CDP Process)

Technical Ladder

The Technical Ladder is about defining the steps to reach the goals by identifying the expectations to cover in a consistent and challenging way. It’s not about executing tasks or actions but to ensure you are able to fulfill these expectations as a settled behavior.

Currently, we have these levels at Ontruck:

L1| Junior SWE

L2|Software Engineer (SWE)

L3|Senior SWE

L3.5|Senior Staff SWE

L4|Principal SWE and Engineering Lead

L5|Head SWE

L6|VP Engineering

L7|CTO

This is just the first step. Then, you need to think about a few things when building the Tech Ladder:

What does it mean to be more senior?

How can people move to the next level?

How many paths do we want to have?

How are we going to group and co-relate the expectations to measure?

What is the lowest level where people can stay forever?

In our case, being more senior is about being able to have more impact and influence on people, initiatives and projects in the company. It’s not only about mastering more languages, technologies or tools or even be more expert in some areas. So, for example, for Software Engineer and Senior SWE levels the main scope is the team but for Senior Staff SWE the main focus is cross-team. These are the areas of influence for our levels:

Individual , focuses mainly on personal development: Junior SWE

, focuses mainly on personal development: Junior SWE Team , the impact is on the team itself: Software Engineer SWE and Senior SWE

, the impact is on the team itself: Software Engineer SWE and Senior SWE Cross-team , influence spans the team itself: Senior Staff SWE, Principal SWE and Engineering Lead, who also has a big responsibility and impact on the team in charge

, influence spans the team itself: Senior Staff SWE, Principal SWE and Engineering Lead, who also has a big responsibility and impact on the team in charge Department & Company, more strategic and broad impact, Head SWE, VP Engineering and CTO

Related to possible paths, we have the same trail until reaching Senior Staff SWE level. At this point people can move to a more technical role as Principal or a more managerial one as Engineering Lead.

We use dimensions to group expectations. Currently, we have: Mastery, Team Success, Deliver Value and Accountability as the areas we value when measuring success.

About the level, people can stay forever, for us, everyone can stay as Senior Software Engineer if they have good development.

Once decided on the general strategy for the Technical Ladder, the hard work starts: identify the expectations for each level. I warn you this will take a lot of time to identify, review and refine everything until having a good enough first version to launch. You can see below a sample of the expectations for the Senior Staff SWE level:

Career Development Plan Process

Once we have a good-enough Technical Ladder (don’t try to have it perfect at the beginning) we can start building our process.

We want to ensure everyone has an individual plan that allows them to progress in the company by identifying areas to improve and define concrete actions to reach their goals.

The direct report is the owner of the CDP, so they should lead proactively the process in terms of pace and the effort needed to accomplish them. The manager is just the facilitator who can support and guide them to make it possible.

We need to ensure to define a structured an efficient process, useful for everyone and that is good communicated and understood. It’s also important to train the leaders to execute it well and homogeneously.

At the beginning, we learnt by trying but having a common ground for the first iteration of the process. We left it open to the managers about how to exactly execute it and how to manage the details, as the template to use. Once the initiative was mature, after more than 15 CDP done, we defined a more formal process incorporating the learnings and unifying the details.

A lesson here is that the CDP is a great tool but don’t underestimate the time and effort to dedicate to have a viable process to launch. We -as managers- need to invest a lot to make it right, the side effect of not doing it is lack of trust and confidence by the people.

Next are a couple of things to have in mind when defining the CDP Process:

Who is legible to access the program?

What are the implications between this process and HR promotions & salary raises policies?

At Ontruck everyone is eligible if they have been at least 6 months in the company and they have a good performance.

Related to HR (we call it People Team), we completely bound our process to People Team's policies, meaning fulfilling a level in our ladder is recognized officially, also in sync with the promotions and salary raise policy.

Once the main concepts are clear, we need to define the steps of the process, for us these are:

Assessment: evaluate the status (Not Accomplished, In progress, Accomplished) of the expectations for the SWE’s level to consolidate a level or to reach the next one Career Definition Plan: from the expectations in progress or not accomplished, choose which ones we want to work on and define Goals, Measure of success and Action Steps for each of them Follow-ups: formal and periodic check-ins to ensure the progress is good enough and to remove impediments Closure: most of the expectations are covered and the level is fulfilled, close the CDP and decide the next steps

The process starts when the manager and the direct report, do the assessment asynchronously and blindly (without looking to the other one). Once it’s done the manager cross-checks the two evaluations, decides the final rating for each expectation and arranges a meeting to discuss and identify the expectations to work on.

After that, the manager works on making a solid proposal as a starting point to discuss, mainly about the Goals and the Measure of Success to schedule a second meeting to present and improve the proposal and enrich it with the direct report feedback. This can be iterated as many times as needed.

Once there is a good proposal, where both are comfortable with, there will be a CDP kickoff to officially launch the plan. From this point, recurrent follow-ups will happen (for us, once a month).

Ontruck CDP Process Timeframe

Currently, we also have templates both for Assessment and CDP definition and a repository to store the people instances.

Assessment Template

CDP Definition Template

Some Final Tips

Manager preparation and investment is a must, you should invest enough in the preparation, thinking, execution and follow-up to get a great and useful CDP but also to engage the person and show up you are taking as seriously as it is

Technical Ladder and CDP Process definition takes a lot of time and you shouldn’t take a shortcut; think carefully in advance if you want to go with a proper CDP process or otherwise you want to do something lighter (that is also fine!)

Don’t try to create the whole Technical Ladder before start creating CDPs for the people. Under a lean approach, you can start defining the lowest level you need to do the CDPs for the people in this level and, afterward, continue building the Technical ladder bottom-up until having all the levels defined

Fulfill a level is not about covering 100% of the expectations, instead define a more realistic approach, for us at Ontruck is 80%

Although the CDP definition is a collaborative work between manager and direct report, we encourage the managers to make an initial proposal as a starting point to discuss, the main benefit is to have a more efficient process because we don’t start from scratch but also the managers show their commitment and investment in the process

Follow-ups are key to have success in the end, the manager should ask the right questions to know if the CDP is healthy or some adjustments or facilitation needs to be done. A great plan can fail just because of the lack of this tracing

Setup specific meetings for the follow-ups instead of reusing regular 1:1s or multi-purpose meetings, this will help to focus on the CDP avoiding to talk about day by day or unrelated things

Setup a high bar, we want to have a rigorous, challenging but fair for everyone so, don’t be benevolent or lazy when evaluating but on the contrary be exigent and honest

Recognize success, when someone reaches a level is time to celebrate, as something hard to accomplish. Do it in a transparent and positive way to inspire others to do the same

Conclusion

Investing in people's career development is a win-win situation for the company and the employees but we need to face it in a solid, trustable and transparent way, to ensure the people believe it’s a good investment in their personal development and the company get also the benefit of having more engagement and competent people.

For the company, this needs to be the #1 retention initiative, by ensuring a clear path for everyone to develop their career and progress within the company. As a high-valuable side effect, having several CDPs in place will also create a perfect breeding ground to allow to launch powerful projects and initiatives that -in the end- will make a better company.

For Software Engineers, Tech people or employees in general, usually this is the most demanding thing because it will give them a solid opportunity to invest in their career and a clear path to fulfill their ambitions, rather than having shorter-oriented benefits as the salary conditions.

In conclusion, creating Career Development Plans are a great strategy tool for managers to ensure trained, engaged and committed people, fully aligned with what cares more to them and by using a win-win approach.