Wikimedia Engineering/Careers/Discussion notes

September 10, 2013 - Continuation of Careers Discussion

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Careers

Possible challenging things // What are the hairy issues we need to talk about?

• What do things mean (like "Architect")?
• Are changes in technology reflected in current titles? Back in the day challenges were different (scaling, etc.), now different (mobile, front-end presentation) - do we represent current issues well enough in titles?
• In Ops, no disambiguation in roles/titles - SRE not used so far (except for postings), just Operations Engineers and Architect; Senior Ops vs. Ops?
  • "Straight-forward" but process needed to evaluate promotions?
• People aren't here forever - titles should reflect what they did here for their next place (e.g. external market/industry/…)
  • audiences are "each other", "future employers", "larger community", "the government (for visas)", "future employees (sexy/attractive job titles)", others?
• Titles vs. roles - "Senior Software Engineer" vs. "Features Infrastructure Lead" - you could have both at the same time.
• No Architect roles (titles?) in Features / front-end
• What's the path beyond SSE - is "Architect" a promotion? Is it the promotion? What other promotions exist, if any? What if you want to be "Epic Engineer"? (And at the other end - no Associate Software Engineer?)
• Want to be as flat an organisation as possible - how do we stay flat(ish) with title variance?
• Could we all just pick our own titles? Or different strokes for different folks?
• Need for calibration of "Senior" (etc.) between different rank systems (Senior Engineer vs. Senior Designer vs. Senior Product Manager)
• Do remote people get promoted less often (no, not frequency, we're talking statistically) than people in the office? Is there data?
  • Is there causality?
    • There's general industry data that says that remote staff almost always get promoted less and which establishes (to the best of "management science"'s ability) causality - however, it's not a slam-dunk that that's the case at WMF specifically.
      • That does not establish causality. It establishes correlation.
      • Template:CitationNeeded
        • http://www.economist.com/node/21564581 && http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-showing-your-face-at-work-matters/
• Hard when hiring to have a job title structure that is externally-understandable. (See above re. attractive job titles.)
• Having a standard for announcing changes? (explaining rationale behind the promotion, for example)

Chat

• Does anyone care about job titles? They're useless pretty much everywhere, but particularly in non-profits.
  • Part of the proposal is to continue the link between titles and salary bands AIUI. I take it people care about their salaries? ;)
    • So then does "senior" mean anything besides "paid more"?
      • In theory it means "you have this set of qualities that we value and therefore we pay you more", I suppose
  • They do actually mean something (everything?) when you want to move to another org. I've already had people at conferences tell me that my job title is underwhelming when I described what I actually did. It's also important when talking to vendors and you're trying to get donations.
    • If you think your job title means everything when you want to move to another org... you're mistaken. :-)

• We're not even close to flat...
  • You have no idea how bad it can get. :-)
    • I believe we should be flatter, but that issue is orthogonal to that of titles
      • Should? Could? Will?

• Re. remote promotions: some of the teams that have very little title diversity are also very strongly remote (e.g. operations), so that might skew things
• Salary transparency (at least on OfficeWiki)?
  • could cause emotional turmoil!
  • Are paybands on office wiki?
    • Would be good
    • They are for Features Eng :)
      • Where?
        • Sue's safe
        • I guess they're not; other stuff about titles is. The numbers were given to everyone in features eng though, FWIW
          • Helpful. :-)
            • Ask Terry to put them on officewiki then :)
  • If visible outside of WMF, potentially decreases bargaining power for a new job
    • We could put it on office wiki
• So what is an Architect again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architect_(The_Matrix)

Form 990: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/b5/Form_990_-_FY_11-12_-_Public.pdf

• Key phrase: "FY 11-12". These things are always ~18 months behind.
  • Per Erik: Ask Sue. :-)
  • See also: https://gitorious.org/floss-foundations (related NPOs eg EFF, CC, etc 990s and other docs)

• Let's not re-invent the wheel here - there's the industrystandard SFIA ("Skills Framework for the Information Age"): http://resources.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/13_skillsframeworkv4_tcm6-9059.pdf (outline)
  • different context- 'Enterprise Architect' ;)
    • Context switch, most descriptions probably apply to us anyway !

Actions

• Gayle to get data on remote promotions vs. local promotions
• Gayle will bring up with Engineering Management that:
  • Streamlined and regular process for announcing hires and promotions/title changes - centralise?
• Having a mailing list for announcements without reply-all for joins/changes/parts?
  • Just don't reply all! Reply only to the new/leaving person! +1
  • Google+ -1-1
    • Is this an action or a chat? :)
    • Replace hiring/leaving thread
• Consistency in announcing hires/promotions/role changes
  • on @wikimediaatwork?
  • Some hires weren't announced for some reason
  • also, blog.wikimedia.org and/or wikitech-l is "sometimes" used to announce role changes and/or hired people
  • I find the @wikimediaatwork handle completely unengaging. We can make it more attractive as an outreach tool about working at wiki.
    • See http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%40wikimedia&q2=%40wikimediaatwork&q3=%40jointheflock&via=Topsy
• Engineering mgmt to flesh out titles/role descriptions
  • Specific focus on architect role to ensure that this is an actual career path that is accessible to people