On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:15 AM, Faidon Liambotis faidon@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