Urban Airship

Uh oh!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

urbanairship / techladder Public

• Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings
• Fork 22
• Star 113
• Code
• Issues 0
• Pull requests 0
• Actions
• Projects
• Security and quality 0
• Insights

Additional navigation options

• Code
• Issues
• Pull requests
• Actions
• Projects
• Security and quality
• Insights

urbanairship/techladder

7 Branches 0 Tags

Open more actions menu

Folders and files

Name Name

Last commit message

Last commit date

Latest commit

pdxmele

Merge pull request #14 from urbanairship/2023-updates

Open commit detailssuccess

May 5, 2023

8c56bec

• May 5, 2023

History

43 Commits

Open commit details

43 Commits

html

html

Very minor style cleanups

Nov 20, 2013

• gitignore
• gitignore

checkin of v1

Nov 19, 2013

Makefile

Makefile

simple and short sed vs. complicated and long awk. this too might not…

Jan 7, 2014

OWNERS

OWNERS

update eng IC roles, add arch info directly, remove extra spaces

May 5, 2023

README.md

README.md

remove admin wording and simplify sentence

Mar 1, 2022

eng.md

eng.md

update eng IC roles, add arch info directly, remove extra spaces

May 5, 2023

Repository files navigation

• README

What is this?

This project describes a set of job titles for software and infrastructure engineers and their managers. It was developed by members of the technology team at Airship, but could be used as a starting point for your titles within another organization. The actual titles are in the doc called 'eng'.

Why spend time on something so boring?

We all want our company to be a place where great engineers can make a career out of building great software for our customers. To do that, we need several things: a shared idea of what makes an engineer "great", room for people to grow and develop for the long term, and a way of recognizing and rewarding continuing excellence. We also shouldn't have to take everyone who's really good at their job out of that job and into a management role just so they can get a promotion and the good stuff that comes along with it.

Defining formal titles for both individual contributors and managers (with a rough correspondence between them) draws a sort of crude map of how people can grow within the organization. By combining this with regular performance review and promotion opportunities, we can provide public recognition for sustained job performance, as well as help to prompt productive discussions around goal-setting and development.

We have to be sensitive to the risks and potential pitfalls that accompany a formal job ladder as well. Titles can reinforce social dynamics that allow more senior team members to shout down or suppress good ideas from their junior colleagues. Also, if people perceive unfairness or favoritism in the assignment of titles, they may make decisions about which teams or projects to join that are detrimental to the rest of the organization.

Overall, titles should be used as one of many tools in a manager's kit to motivate, recognize, and develop the members of their team. They are in some ways the public complement to private rewards like compensation and equity, and if over-emphasized or mis-applied have many of the same potential pitfalls (e.g.: overjustification effect).

Why not just put this in a spreadsheet or a presentation or something like a normal manager-type person?

Most "job ladders" (as the progression of titles is usually called) are developed outside by senior management or HR in a fairly opaque way, and changing them is very hard. As engineers, we expect for well-intentioned and well-made changes to be continuously included in our projects, and we believe there's no reason that job descriptions can't work the same way.

So, fork away! If you have suggestions, submit a pull request and send a note to the folks listed in the OWNERS file.

About

Job titles and descriptions for UA engineering

Resources

Readme

Activity

Custom properties

Stars

113 stars

Watchers

112 watching

Forks

22 forks

Report repository

Releases

No releases published

Contributors8 (8)

Languages

• Makefile76.7%
• CSS23.3%