I cut my teeth during my first decade of my working life experiencing the software engineering job family, starting as a junior engineer in 2000 and working my way up to principal engineer by 2010 (and then spent eight years from PE to CTO, then switching down to engineering manager in 2021). In between senior engineer and making principal engineer, I switched from coding to software engineering management and project delivery. Just before going back to technical, as a principal engineer, I was performing at the level of a senior technical program manager and software delivery owner for a very large software stack.
I was fortunate to have worked for pure software product companies in that time, focused on consumer applications as well as infrastructure systems. The companies were led by people with an engineering background, CEOs/VPs/Directors with PhDs in the sciences, who had practiced as engineers before getting into leadership positions. As such, the culture of those companies were very engineering focused - leaders took the time needed to develop clear guidelines for career planning and development. The job family framework NDS created was super helpful in level setting expectations with engineers and managers alike. People had a map to reference, removing the ambiguity and suspicion that often comes with promotions. A clear job family framework, in my opinion, is a must-have for any engineering organisation because it provides people with direction to chart their career path. It is an extremely powerful mechanism especially when the company is diverse and allows a spread of career options. Having this map allowed me to experiment with different roles myself, switching between business units and trying roles out, until I figured I'd explored enough or reached my aspirations.
I'm talking about years 2003 to 2011, working with what was at the time, the world's leader in TV software and encryption systems, with offices world-wide (
NDS/Cisco/Synamedia). I left that company with solid engineering management experiences and upon returning to South Africa, was well positioned to help raise the bar of engineering excellence. Surprisingly, more than ten years later, working in Amazon AWS, I marvel at NDS's high bar in the early 2000s - pretty much working now for Amazon AWS, I'm pretty much picking up from where I left behind in NDS from an engineering excellence perspective, I'm glad I schooled with NDS.
When I led one of the largest consumer device initiatives in the history of that company, in 2011-2013 - I was quite surprised that the engineering organisation was missing a vital mechanism for its engineering workforce:
The Engineering Job Family guidelines Career Ladder. As a program manager without much direct hierarchical influence, all I could do at the time was provide feedback to engineering leaders about the quality of their engineers and managers, as not meeting the high bar expected from the industry. I influenced quite a bit of change indirectly, helping overhaul the entire technology division's structure and engineering practices that was needed to get the program delivered. However, I couldn't do much about the HR guidelines when it came to job specifications. Instead, I wrote a blog post about my experiences and shared
this with the HR/Tech executives in 2013.
Here's some proof of the indirect / referent influence I had as a program manager overhauling the engineering org, that if we didn't do would've cause the project to fail:
When I branched out on my own doing management consulting, I was invited by the business HR & Tech executives to talk more about the technical career ladder framework, which I picked up from NDS days.
[P.S. I'm sharing material I created as a management consultant. If you'd like a copy of the frameworks, please reach out to me via my contact page.
Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences to showcase to prospective employers, future clients if I decide to consult again. I'm publishing my work portfolio so that recruiters / headhunters or hiring managers have easy access to my work products, saving you time. If you like what you see, let's talk!]
I created this slide deck to talk about the concepts:
