Job titles aren’t what they once were.
Of course, they’ve never been what they once were, either. We like to put order to the chaos, imagining some consistent through line in tech, but I’ve seen few companies maintain their engineering ladder, at least for ICs, for any extended period of time. They tend to be somewhat volatile over the lifetime of a company, through growth and acquisitions, the influences of new products and philosophies in developing a tech ecosystem.
I recently wrote on Linkedin how I had the good fortune of earning the title of Staff Engineer once again, after having had a gap of several years without it. That seemed to gain some traction (and, many thanks to everyone for the kudos, from folks throughout my career, which was humbling and deeply appreciated). It’s worth taking time to give a bit of retrospective on it.
Earning Staff at Etsy
In 2016 I was promoted to Staff Engineer at Etsy. I’d been working on that promo for two or three years. I can bore you with the bona fides, but it’s not particularly interesting – projects that had deep and meaningful impact but without a lot of context are hard to put into the perspective of moving the needle. Sometimes that happens too – infrastructure changes where no one notices or big dips in resource usage that are lost to the comparison of what the system has grown to since. I will say that it took me going through numerous direct managers (I believe I had something around six or seven direct managers in the span of a year+) and many indirect managers beyond that to make it happen. Along with that, I even requisitioned commendation from the author of the primary language we used (Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP) as part of a seventeen page packet to make it happen. It was effortful, in short.
Moving to Fastly
And then I switched jobs. In the ensuing time after the promotion I felt a bit of a harder ceiling. No, I hadn’t any expectations of an earned promotion since, of course, that would be exceptional. But I could see the challenges there weren’t the kind for me and the echoes of the 2017 layoffs still reverberating. I switched to Fastly, working on tooling and projects that were intentionally outside my comfort zone. I wasn’t getting any significant pay raise, and it was only a few months before going public, so my options were limited. Notably, though, I went back to “Senior”, as the next step up there was Principal and I knew I wasn’t that, nor was Fastly hiring external candidates under normal circumstances.
And it was fine. No major complaints with the role, getting a paycheck, working remotely. That’s ok to have in careers. The upward trajectory wasn’t there either, but I was picking up a bunch of tech I hadn’t previously had experience with, broadening my skills, and holding an “SRE” title (as the joke goes, the way to add $10k to your salary). That was the intent – don’t get pigeonholed as only a PHP/MySQL dev, which was the case. But again, I saw the writing on the wall, the gap between Senior and Principal (with no stop in between) made distinct. I may be telling tales outside of school here – there were specific Principal Engineers who intentionally made it difficult to hold onto that ruling class. I didn’t have the mentorship to grow, but was content otherwise unless another opportunity presented itself.
Engineering at Jeli
Which is when that opportunity did, in fact, arrive. I was approached to start at Jeli, building incident analysis tools. For anyone who knows me, that’s some serious catnip. I wanted to work with people I knew, doing the work that felt deeply meaningful. I promised myself no more start ups, but here was my chance to build the SaaS that I still to this day believe people need (and no company has fully hit on yet, including my current role – we’re still working on it!). It was a pay cut, a significant one at that, with little more than some basic code and an incorporation that I was joining, as employee number four and the first primary backend engineer.
I wrestled with this one for weeks. My wife and I tried to talk through all the ways it could work and it could fail. She trusted me and we took a gamble (notably just before the pandemic started – how much a few months changes). The drop in compensation was somewhat mollified by a decent options package (hopefully!) and the prospect of doing what I love. Six months later, the CTO was out and a year after starting the previous engineer was gone as well. As you can imagine, 2020 was a tumultuous year in a number of ways.
In my naivete, I trusted folks. I didn’t put anything about a title in a contract. Consistently in meetings and one-on-one’s with management I was placated with assurances that someday we’ll get titles, we just need Product Market Fit (that magical place where everything is perfect and we can finally get our just rewards). I was a nuisance about it, repeatedly bringing it up at length while riding several years as “Software Engineer”. If you’ve seen my previous post on Developing an Engineering Ladder, it spawned from a previous iteration I proposed internally to management (who were too overwhelmed to give titles to Engineering ICs but were able to for other members of the organization). They were “working on it” and “well, we’re just not quite there yet” was often the refrain.
Acquisition and Onwards
Then Jeli was acquired by PagerDuty. This was part way through promised “we’re working on a ladder, it’ll be here soon!” which, as you can imagine, didn’t materialize. A cursory conversation with a Senior Director and a Principal Engineer as part of due diligence and…congrats, you’re a Senior Engineer. Again. But don’t worry – we’ll review in three months and adjust as needed. This, again, never came to be but even still – how much work could you do in three months onboarding an entire company to justify a promotion? Four years building a start up through a pandemic, then acquired for an undisclosed sum, the most tenured employee after the CEO, and I’ve earned Senior. No salary bump, under market RSUs, and a company of engineers who see a forty one year old engineer twenty years in the industry as a Senior Engineer. It’s a recipe for getting stuck in a loop.
I wasn’t about to start from scratch, at least in a place that was lowballing me. To be dispassionate, it makes sense. Why overpay for an engineer in a market that’s as tough as it is? They bought the product and there’s nothing magical about how to run it.
If anything I can impose upon folks working in tech, it’s to understand your value as best you can, current and potential. I was undervalued, so I found greener pastures. It’s a business decision.
So what? Titles are arbitrary anyways
There’s reason in this, despite all of the above. I often reference “On Being a Senior Engineer“, which makes salient points about titles not making mature engineers and the expertise existing outside of it. As much as the tech social media hates it, there’s nuance.
I’ve been highly impactful the last few years “only” holding these titles. Careers do ebb and flow, the expertise valued one day becoming stale the next. Are you a better engineer for holding that title? No. Likewise, they’re not consistent through the industry. An L5 out of 7 in one company and an L5 of 10 are notably different.
But of course, it’s also a job. Hierarchy is built on titles, and the meetings you’re invited to are often determined by your title. Which then implies the work assignments you get, the technical decision making from top down, and affording you opportunities for bigger impact. With discussions about salary bands, too, it’s impossible to ignore that more senior (lowercase s) titles means better compensation.
Similarly, we’re coming up with whole new positions. AI Prompt Engineer, Reliability Engineer, Platform Engineer – these are often ambiguous terms with some but not necessarily fully shared understanding. I don’t blame anyone for taking those roles if it means a pay upgrade or getting out of a company seeking to burnout its employees. I’m curious how many of them will exist in 5-10 years.
Was it a mistake to switch?
Who can say? Hindsight can point out some flaws in our decision making but don’t guarantee a better future from those alternate paths not taken, a choice we can’t retake anyways. So why look back? Just like any incident analysis, the principle of local rationality means things made sense at the time, but we can use that information to help form future decisions or better understand our surroundings.
For one, the job market has been tough. It still is. It’s been difficult for a while and I don’t see an immediate upturn in the future. If you’re a Principal engineer and can only find Staff Engineer roles, do you sit on the sidelines burning through your savings or stick it out in a role that is under-serving your career? Hard to say. I’ve noticed that there are plenty of roles that ask for Staff level work but assign Senior titles in my most recent hunt for a new position.
Another is the friends we made along the way. I mean that sincerely – I’ve built a strong network over the last 5+ years of folks. I can’t stress enough how enormously powerful it is to have folks who can advocate for you, send you roles when you’re searching or send out requests for opportunities without making it public, maybe help with the interview process or offering advice. I’m extraordinarily fortunate to have connected with fantastic people and I can’t say for sure how many of them I would’ve still known had I not hopped around.
Is swapping roles still the way to get promoted? I’m inclined to say, broadly, no with exceptions here and there. If the above is to be believed, there just aren’t as many roles for more senior positions, as companies prefer to underlevel and “keep open the option”. I know there’s pushback on gaps in resumes and shorter stints – I still firmly believe it’s ok to have those things. I also know what I believe to be fair and what hiring committees look at are a Venn diagram with some intersections and lots of differences.
Lastly, I think there’s a big gap between Staff and above. I know there has to be a re-leveling with titles as we start having more and more folks at the top with nowhere to go. There should be break points in a career and some speed bumps to afford us the time to reevaluate things, look at how we can act more holistically in our day to day work. If any folks are struggling as I did, I’d suggest finding mentorship in existing roles and/or looking for resources that can help guide you. Some suggestions:
- On Being a Principal Engineer, Silvia Botros
- The Staff Engineer’s Path, Tanya Reilly
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track, Will Larson