![]() Your manager won’t hold shifting business priorities against you, but she can’t exactly give you “credit” for bad luck, either. This impact can come in many forms, but you have to deliver. How? Because you don’t get promoted for your skill you get promoted for your demonstrated impact on the organization and the business. But sometimes you’re right…and the company is, too. Sometimes this happens because you’re wrong, and you’ve misjudged your own abilities. This situation - when you know you have the skill to operate at the next level, but the company doesn’t seem willing to recognize it - can be particularly frustrating. You might be certain that you have all the skills of a senior engineer, but you have to convince the company that this is the case, lest we fall victim to the Peter principle and promote people to their level of incompetence. This can feel unfair - why am I delivering value at an L5 level and only getting paid like an L4? - until you remember that promoting you is a risk for the company, and since the company doesn’t want to make a mistake and lose you, they’re risk-averse. So when we promote someone, we need to be sure that it’s the right decision it’s better for everyone to have you perform solidly at L5 than to struggle at L6.īecause levels are conservative, you’ll often hear managers say that promotions are a lagging indicator of performance: You have to demonstrate that you’re performing at the next level, consistently, over a significant period of time. One important thing to understand is that levels are conservative by default: Once we put someone in a level, the only practical way we can “take it back” is by managing the person out of the company, which is painful for both parties. ![]() Leveling decisions can sometimes seem unfair, and fairness is one of Carta’s most important values. This is why our levels aren’t linear, and neither is compensation. You’ll note that this is not a linear progression, especially at the top of the range moving the trajectory of the industry is exponentially harder than moving the trajectory of the company. We can sum up the entire system by describing the (rough) impact we expect employees to have as they progress: on tasks (L2), on features (元), on problems (L4), on teams (L5), on the organization (L6), on the company (L7), and on the industry (L8). As the company matures, fine-tuning this balance - and fighting bias - only increases in importance.įortunately, it’s easy to articulate the single most important thing for leveling: your impact on the company. The truth is, some boxes are important to check, but there is a degree of judgment that comes into leveling and promotion decisions. If the list is too specific, it encourages employees to check boxes rather than focus on doing their job. If the list is too general, it doesn’t give employees a clear picture of what they need to do to advance. Writing down the precise requirements for what constitutes performance at a given level is tough. It’s worth understanding them - and the way we assess them - as you think about your career. ![]() ![]() These levels are similar to the ones that exist at other comparable tech companies, but they’re not identical. We hope that by sharing it here we can help demystify some common questions about engineering career ladders and communicate our values to candidates and prospects alike.Ĭarta has eight full-time engineering levels, plus a separate level for interns. What follows is our internal engineering leveling guide, lightly edited for public consumption. At Carta, we want everyone to understand how the company thinks about fairness and compensation, why our leveling processes exist, and what they’re trying to achieve. Engineering leaders talk about levels and promotion processes a lot, but they focus more on the what and not the why. To that end, having a fair, equitable, and clear framework for leveling and career progression is one of our most important goals. At Carta, we follow Jim Barksdale’s maxim: “take care of the people, the products, and the profits…in that order.” We believe people are the business: building an environment where our engineers want to come to work every day and know they can grow their careers is the best technical leverage we could hope for. ![]()
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