🌐 Web Engineering Framework

💬 Communication

  • Provides regular status updates to their mentor/buddy
  • Points out syntactical improvements in code reviews
  • Writes PR descriptions that provide basic context for the change
  • Seeks guidance from other engineers, rather than answers

💥 Impact

  • Delivers assigned tasks, working with a more senior team member, and able to take PR feedback to improve their work

👩‍💼 Leadership

✨ Influence

  • Improves documentation that is incorrect

🛠️ Mastery

  • Learns to write semantic HTML and CSS following guidance and training materials
  • Learns to write correct JavaScript following guidance and training materials
  • Uses Chrome, React, and Redux DevTools effectively to increase productivity during development and debugging
  • Implements simple components
  • Fixes simple bugs
  • Asks questions and actions feedback from mentor
  • Uses git to manage the development workflow effectively
    • Checkout, Push, Pull, Branch, Diff, Merge, Stash, Rebase, etc.

💬 Communication

  • Proactively communicates to their team what they are working on, why, how it’s going and what help they need
  • Accepts feedback graciously
  • Gives feedback to peers when asked
  • Provides helpful and actionable feedback in code reviews in an empathetic manner
    • Take a look at the levelling up your code reviews talk for some ideas
  • Writes PR descriptions that provide context and provide rationale for significant decisions
    • I decided to X instead of Y here, I also considered Z but for these reasons I went with X

💥 Impact

  • Delivers assigned tasks that meet expected criteria
  • Works for the team, focuses on tasks that contribute to team goals
  • Tries to unblock themselves first before seeking help
  • Manages their own time effectively, prioritises their workload well, on time for meetings, aware when blocking others and unblocks
  • Helps the team, does what needs doing
  • Breaks down small/medium problems into iterative steps

👩‍💼 Leadership

✨ Influence

  • Proactively raises issues they spot in retrospectives

🛠️ Mastery

  • Writes semantic HTML and CSS following accepted best practices
  • Uses appropriate algorithms and data structures to solve problems
  • Writes Flow types to statically type-check the code at compile-time
  • Writes automated unit and end-to-end tests following accepted best practices
  • Deploys web services into staging and production following our deployment guidelines
  • Assists on the design of new features and components
  • Solves well-defined tasks within our current developer abstractions
  • Integrates with backend APIs and handles successful and failed responses properly
  • Works with users to improve new and existing simple features iteratively
  • Uses a keyboard and screen-reader to manually test their application for accessibility issues
  • Runs automated auditing tools such as Lighthouse before submitting a PR for review
  • Demonstrates awareness of a range of security considerations, and mitigates against them
  • Has multiple examples of where performance was considered as part of a solution
  • Applies fundamental UX and accessibility principles to common problems such as form design
    • Referencing (and improving) existing Design Systems where possible
  • Writes correct JavaScript code following accepted best practices
    • Follows our JavaScript Coding Conventions & Best Practices; uses language-level primitives correctly
  • Implements simple components following accepted best practices
    • Follows React Development Conventions & Best Practices; uses component state and lifecycle methods correctly
  • Uses shared libraries to reuse existing functionality
    • lib.money
    • lib.api
    • lib.identity-verification, etc.

💬 Communication

  • Transparent about mistakes they’ve made, early
  • Proactively gives timely actionable feedback to peers
  • Proactively seeks feedback from the people around them
  • Considers the opinions of others before defending their own

💥 Impact

  • Delivers large well-defined tasks and solves small scope not-well-defined problems
  • Contributes to writing proposals (Co-authors with more experienced Engineer)
  • Breaks down large problems into smaller iterative steps across multiple PRs

👩‍💼 Leadership

  • Onboards / mentors new engineers
  • Finds learning opportunities for others when reviewing their code and follows it up
    • I think this code could be improved by doing X, let’s pair on it and I’ll talk through why X is good for this

✨ Influence

  • Provides valuable input to proposals from their team
  • Proactively improves modules, services, systems and codebases they encounter, ’this doesn’t make sense, I’m going to do something about it'
  • Contributes to scaling engineering hiring (e.g. leads calls, does onsite interviews)
  • Builds simple tools or iterates existing tools for the benefit of all engineers
  • Helps Product Managers and Designers to understand and consider non-functional requirements in the product development process
  • Promotes accessibility good practice and helps other engineers to deepen their accessibility knowledge, including demonstrating how to use screen readers
  • Promotes security good practice and helps other engineers to deepen their security knowledge
  • Promotes performance good practice and helps other engineers to deepen their performance knowledge

🛠️ Mastery

  • Uses appropriate design patterns to solve problems
  • Identifies obvious deficiencies in the development processes and supports activities to improve them
  • Assists more experienced engineers on the design of larger features
  • Modifies and improves code outside of the developer abstractions and reasons about the improvements effectively
  • Fixes bugs in asynchronous code
  • Debugs production issues
  • Explains developer abstractions and how to contribute to them to other engineers
  • Collaborates with designers and user researchers to create prototypes and to evaluate them
  • Differentiates between user needs and desires and prioritises accordingly
  • Implements non-trivial components
    • Uses modern CSS features like flex-box, grid, media-queries, selectors, etc
    • Uses advanced component patterns higher-order components, render props, controlled components, compound components
  • Writes effective asynchronous code
    • Demonstrates solid understanding of the JavaScript runtime; reasons effectively about the runtime behaviour of asynchronous code; uses async/await, generators and Redux-Saga’s to implement asynchronous code
  • Writes effective JavaScript by applying fundamental functional and reactive principles and techniques where appropriate and guides others in so doing
    • Uses uses event streams, immutable data structures, pure functions, functional composition, memoization, etc.
  • Considers metrics when developing, and uses appropriate services to check quality levels
    • A range, from services such as Lighthouse, WebPageTest, WAVE etc

💬 Communication

  • Proactively gives feedback ‘upwards’ and to people they interact with who are not in their team
  • Transparent in making design and technical decisions
  • Helps people in non-technical roles understand technical constraints / trade-offs
  • Shares technical context and direction for less experienced engineers
  • Gives direct and constructive feedback to other engineers

💥 Impact

  • Solves ambiguous problems
  • Leads writing small/medium scope proposals
  • Thrown at fires and resolves / contributes heavily to resolving them
  • Makes pragmatic choices about taking on tech debt
  • Considers multiple different solutions for solving a problem
  • Breaks down projects into smaller iterative steps that each deliver value

👩‍💼 Leadership

  • Contributes to maintaining the Dummy Co culture in their team, helping new joiners
  • Gets buy-in on technical decision-making and proposed designs
  • Proactively involves other relevant engineers
  • Sought out for code reviews
  • Instills Dummy Co engineering principles in other engineers
  • Helps the growth of engineers around them through coaching and mentoring
  • Helps their squad work together more effectively
  • Helps facilitate team/squad rituals
  • Makes improvements to modules/libraries/services and goes out of their way to help others learn from it
    • I’ve used RxJava for the first time here, I’m going to do a talk about why I’ve done this, here’s some great blog posts on it

✨ Influence

  • Positively influences engineers in the wider org
  • Maintains documentation on things they know the most, makes it easy for future engineers to interact with systems/code
  • Clears blockers for junior team members, provides context/guidance, or knows how to escalate
  • Asks why. Does not take truths for granted unless they understand exactly where they are coming from (especially with regards to regulation, compliance, etc)
  • Drives changes to engineering practices with well-reasoned arguments and a ‘strong opinion, weakly held’ mentality
  • Shapes the direction of systems designs with less experienced engineers
  • Breaks down delivery and knowledge silos in their squad
  • Keeps up to date with industry developments and feeds specific technical and non-functional recommendations back into the business
  • Proactively identifies opportunities to improve company culture around coding standards and non-functional requirements

🛠️ Mastery

  • Writes code that serves as a definitive example for new engineers
  • Makes contributions to library code or other core parts of the applications
  • Makes contributions to our development tools and build processes
  • Writes complex asynchronous and concurrent code
  • Identifies optimisation opportunities in the development process and contributes to the implementation of proposed solutions
  • Builds maintainable and flexible components and applications
  • Leads the refactoring of complex parts of the system
  • Debugs and fixes complex issues at speed
  • Identifies and fixes security weaknesses
  • Identifies and fixes performance bottlenecks in applications
  • Explains all aspects of the web platform to new engineers
  • Implements services or libraries that require a deep level of domain knowledge
  • Puts users first and can manage competing priorities effectively

💬 Communication

  • Helps other people develop themselves and regularly gives insightful, useful feedback to those around them
  • Talks to non-technical stakeholders on appropriate level of abstraction

💥 Impact

  • Solves the ‘hard problem’ in a project e.g. Mastercard crypto and sees it through to resolution
  • Solves larger ambiguous problems
  • Leads incident resolutions
  • Makes judgements about when to diverge from the immediate goal to achieve something else
  • Leading large scale technical infrastructure projects (level 5 would originate or complete, probably)
  • Leads writing large scope proposals
  • Breaks down large long-lasting projects into sensible discrete chunks that compound to achieve a large goal
  • Helps prioritise and balance short-term and long-term investments, focusing on high impact, high value work

👩‍💼 Leadership

  • Instills Dummy Co engineering principles across a whole squad of engineers
  • Works with relevant Engineering Managers to help other engineers perform and grow
  • Fosters effective collaboration in multi-disciplinary squads (backend, mobile, data, design, web)
  • Delegates technical decisions with low risk and high reversibility
  • Owns technical decisions with high risk and low reversibility
  • Contributes to maintaining the Dummy Co culture in the wider company
  • Bootstraps new teams

✨ Influence

  • Represents Dummy Co at conferences/events
  • Given as reason for other engineers to join Dummy Co
  • Proactively shares knowledge internally
  • Acts as the ‘sole proprietor’, in the CEO mindset, their ego/agenda is not a factor in their thinking or decision making

🛠️ Mastery

  • Makes major contributions to library code or core parts of the application
  • Contributes to external technologies or libraries that we depend on
  • Anticipates platform and project needs, technical debt and common issues intuitively
  • Develops clear technical solutions from ambiguous requirements
  • Produces technical designs for large complex projects
  • Uncovers and fixes tricky bugs that have previously evaded detection
  • Demonstrates a deep level of knowledge in a specific area
  • Serves as a technical authority on a technology or an area of the codebase
  • Reviews technical designs and pull requests for large complex projects
  • Encourages and supports other engineers to achieve outstanding results
  • Creates major contributions to our documentation, and creates documents that provide guidelines and best practices to other engineers
  • Works with technical and non-technical stakeholders to identify high-level requirements and turns them into discrete technical concerns

💬 Communication

  • Transparent about feedback they have received and what they are going to do differently

💥 Impact

  • Accountable for delivery of large, mission critical engineering projects
  • Originates or finishes large, horizontal engineering efforts

👩‍💼 Leadership

  • Helps groups of squads work together more effectively
  • Starts things that they cannot finish by themselves
  • Delegates to make better use of their time

✨ Influence

  • Attracts other very senior hires
  • Engineers around them get better and have a bigger impact, faster

🛠️ Mastery

  • Makes major contributions to technologies and libraries that we depend on
  • Uses a risk-based approach and manages technical debt systematically to focus the team’s design and development efforts on the most important problems
  • Works with business and technology stakeholder to translate difficult business problems into technical designs, thereby ensuring that the organisation derives maximum value from services
  • Identifies architecturally significant functional and non-functional requirements, identifies conflicts among them, and defines possible trade-offs scenarios
  • Articulates high-level technical goals, concerns, trade-offs, and decisions to the rest of the company effectively
  • Facilitates technical decision making in complex and ambiguous situations
  • Promotes architectural thinking and good engineering practices at scale
  • Makes improvements that affect important non-functional requirements that have an effect on the entire web-platform
  • Serves as a technical authority in the wider engineering community
  • Identifies and explores opportunities for service and business improvement

About our engineering progression frameworks

The engineering progression framework is a tool that helps engineers and managers:

  • make development and career plans
  • talk about what we’re looking for from engineers in a consistent way
  • set a fair level of compensation.

The framework is a compass, not a GPS.

It’s meant to be helpful. It’s not meant to be a rating system for humans, free from edge cases.

How does it work?

The framework covers all the things we’re looking for from engineers at Dummy Co. We’re interested in these five elements:

  • Mastery - Your Dummy Co knowledge and technical capability
  • Impact - The size, scope and value of what you deliver
  • Influence - How you change the world around you for the better
  • Comms & Feedback - How you interact with others
  • Leadership - How people around you become better and more impactful

We sort them into six levels, and we try to give specific examples of behaviours we expect for each. Each of those levels has a fairly wide salary range associated with it, and within each level you can progress in sub-levels, labelled A–E. So even if you’re at level 3 for a couple of years, you’ll still be able to see that you’re moving forward. Basically, the more behaviours you show from your level, the more you’ll progress.

Your manager will work with you on this. None of it will happen mysteriously behind closed doors. You’ll agree what level of progression you’re going for and what you need to improve on with your manager. It should be clear how you’re doing relative to that at all times.

Things to keep in mind

  • There are many different ways to progress and be valuable to Dummy Co as you grow, including deep technical knowledge and ability, technical leadership and people management. All are equally valuable paths in Dummy Co’s engineering team.
  • The framework represents a career’s worth of progression, people shouldn’t expect to fly up it in 18 months!
  • Engineering progression isn’t an exact science and there will always be some ambiguity.
  • This isn’t a checklist – it’s possible to progress up a level without showing all the behaviours in that level.
  • There will be levels on top (eg ‘Inventor of Android’ or ‘Author of Go’), but we won’t add them until we need them.
  • You can find some more information in these links. If that doesn’t answer most of your questions, please ask your manager.

Give us your feedback!

This is only the first version of our framework and we really want your feedback.

We’re particularly keen to add as many examples to the behaviours as possible, to further clarify them.