On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:15 AM, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Faidon,
great questions.
The "architect" title, besides the job
description that you described, is
also a seniority level within the WMF's engineering department. Other
organizations do e.g. "sr./staff/sr. staff" and/or numeric levels, we do
"associate / (blank) / sr. / (lead) architect". At least that's my
understanding of what was presented during the last all-staff and documented
on officewiki.
On
mediawiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Careers
What would happen to this seniority level, if any of
the options you
presented were to be adopted? You seem to hint that there would be a mapping
with option D ("salary increases") but it's not clear to me how direct of
a
mapping or a prerequisite would that be.
Let me try to respond to this and your other comments in one go. Folks
who don't care about WMF internals should stop reading at this point.
This stuff doesn't matter to everyone, if it doesn't matter to you,
that's OK. :)
There are four main salary band levels we work with in engineering:
entry-level, mid-level, senior level, and director/architect level.
Each of these bands is pretty wide, i.e. tens of thousands of dollars
for an SF-based hire between the lowest and the highest point. There's
a lot of room for progression within a given band, and it's OK for
folks to live outside a given band, which tends to make this somewhat
less urgent in practical terms. That said, one of the fundamental
principles I believe in is that it should be possible to progress to
the highest salary band on either the development or the management
side.
It seems that based on the discussion, nobody's particularly in favor
of a broad community process regarding architecture roles, so some of
the intricacies of progression tied in any way to such a process may
be moot. What might have some degree of traction, based on the
discussion, is to have some blessed delegation coming from the
original triumvirate of architects.
In practice, I could see this tie into the career progression at WMF
in two main ways:
1) We continue to (rarely but sometimes) use the Architect title as
the highest salary band in engineering, and promote people into it
based on a track record of continued architectural leadership, as
proven in a do-o-cracy framework like the one suggested by Brion.
2) We don't award Architect as a job title beyond the original
triumvirate, but we _do_ introduce a Senior Software Engineer II (same
band as the Architect band), and would define some criteria for that,
among which proven architectural leadership could be one. We can
choose to still recognize any continued membership in something like a
core maintainers groups etc. in a person's role, but that's decoupled
from the salary band and can change, consistent with the idea that it
should be OK for an architect to spend time doing other fun &
important things, rather than being locked into one set of
responsibilities forever.
I think the second is more consistent with the tenor of the discussion
here so far, because in the first case, the coupling between job
titles and responsibilities in our community might be too tight to
maintain flexibility and openness. It would also recognize that
technical leadership doesn't _just_ mean taking on broad architectural
responsibilities. So for example development of unique and
mission-critical domain expertise might be another way to progress
into Sr. II.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation