Why clear career expectations matter more than the ladder itself
A career ladder document is a useful artifact, but it’s not the point. What actually matters is that an engineering manager is explicit with their team about expectations, direction, and where each person stands with respect to compensation and promotion. Formalized laddering can support that clarity, but it can also exist while managers still mislead their reports. The document is one tool in a process, not a substitute for one.
What a career ladder defines
Career laddering is typically an internal system that states expectations for different levels of a role and defines how one moves to the next level. A good ladder goes beyond a list of duties. In the open-sourced example at career-ladders.dev, the levels follow a simple conceptual progression:
- Senior — you perform your role at a high level and reach the ceiling of your own individual output.
- Staff — you expand beyond yourself, teaching others and supporting their needs.
- Principal — you create systems that scale beyond yourself, enabling the success of everyone around you.
This framing is effective because the most senior people aren’t gatekeepers of knowledge; they’re putting what they know into practice in ways that benefit the whole organization.
Adopting this exact system isn't required. What’s important is that each person understands their role and what’s expected of them.
Clarity as a foundation
Few things demoralize employees faster than uncertainty about their career trajectory and whether their title and compensation are fair. That ambiguity is distracting and exhausting, and it can easily lead to burnout. Even intrinsically motivated employees can feel misaligned when they don’t see how their work maps to the company’s larger goals — and the harder they’re working, the more hurtful that disconnect can be.
Being transparent about an employee’s current level and what they should focus on next is critical. So is sharing timelines for promotion cycles when you know them. When a manager works with someone on a growth path, they enter a partnership rooted in trust. Ideally the goals you set together serve the employee broadly, not just the company, which gives the work a larger purpose.
There’s one caveat: if you guide an employee through this process and they fulfill their end, you must give them the promotion — the title change and the compensation that goes with it. Not following through breaks the partnership’s bond.
Putting the process into practice
A purely documented ladder misses the point. The value comes from applying it with intention in regular conversations.
Start with the longer view
Asking someone where they see themselves in five years can feel like a loaded question — tedious, even. But the answers are rarely meant to be precise career maps. They surface values, boundaries, and preferences that matter for how someone should spend their time now. Common responses often sound like:
- knows they don’t want to focus on build systems in five years
- thinks they may want to try management, even though they haven’t tried it yet
- values flexibility to work remotely and travel with family
- wants to create opportunities for developers in their home region
These aren’t five-year outlines, but they reveal what should be woven into the person’s current working environment.
Review the ladder with self-assessment
In the career laddering review, it’s valuable to have the employee read out each expectation for their current role and self-assess their progress on each item. This gives them a sense of ownership over their evaluation. Managers can then weigh in on those assessments and explore the next career level’s expectations.
A typical outcome might sound like this: “You’re solidly a Senior. To reach Staff, you need to focus more on helping others. Let’s free up time for more PR reviews and pairing, and let’s talk about finishing that internal tool — it would likely help the team move faster.”
The 30/60/90, reversed
A useful follow-up is the 30/60/90 plan — but with a twist: start with the 90-day goals. Since the career ladder review is fresh, employees already have guidance on where their focus should lie. Ask what they want to accomplish in three months and let them drive.
Those 90-day goals can take many forms. They may be quantifiable:
- “I’d like to close five issues a week, ideally with two pull requests.”
- “I’d like to fill content gaps on two features.”
- “I’d like to pair with at least two people.”
They can be metric-based (e.g., increasing an npm package’s adoption by 10%) or less measurable (e.g., asking better questions in meetings or interrupting people less). All of these are valid.
From the defining 90-day plan, work backwards and break out the 30-day slice. Management should only step in if the goals seem over-ambitious or miss a critical company need. The plan isn’t rigid — things change, and adjustments aren’t a failure.
That’s also the moment to discuss what the employee should not be doing. If someone is spending time on work that isn’t useful to them or the company, a manager can help remove that task and communicate the shift to other stakeholders — a conversation an employee might not be able to hold themselves.
The need for iteration
Revisit the 30/90 plan about once a month during the one-on-one. Track progress, mark completed items, and celebrate successes along the way. Then roll the unfinished items into the next month and carve out a new near-term block. Every few months, the full laddering exercise is repeated with notation on progress made in each area.
This cadence supports over-performers and under-performers alike. People who appear burned out might simply be overloaded with misaligned tasks; clarity around scope helps them prioritize. People perceived as lazy might actually be misaligned with the purpose of their work and need to see where their tasks fit into the bigger picture.
A system with no surprises
A recurring career ladder process means a promotion shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. Employees know where they stand, what they need to do to improve, and roughly when they can expect the next step. The team sees the same system and can understand why someone is elevated at a particular moment.
What a manager accomplishes here is taking careers as seriously as technical processes. The goal isn't a perfect ladder. The goal is to ensure that everyone has a clear path forward and can focus on impactful, rewarding work that gets properly recognized.
