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> At Shopify, our primary job is to build products, not career ladders.

If only my company understood this, we would spend so less time on optics. Managers would be rated on their ability to build products rather than on generating "short-term impact" documents for optics.

Engineers these days are asked to spend far too much time documenting their work for optics than on the actual work itself. This comes from a place of career-ladder managers who don't really know anything about the business except people management. These management practices are an incredible overhead on the business.




Netflix did this right: they had no ladder for as long as possible and outsourced raises to the market ("bring an offer and we'll match it").


I'd love to hear the perspective of current or former employees of Netflix.

At some point, they decided that an IC career ladder was important and instituted it. Management always had a ladder so that's not new.

What changed?


Netflix outgrew its one-size-fits-all solution. Here are the details:

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/netflix-levels/




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