Engineering's Ability: Technical Skill (Engineering)

• Breadth of experience (applications, services, domains, technologies, stacks)
• Knowledge of best practices
• Testing
• Refactoring and codebase improvements
• Tooling and awareness of progress in industry

Small amount of experience in one area (application, service, domain, technology, stack,etc).

Able to identify and communicate problems with technology; able to suggest improvements to existing technology and tools.

Example behaviours:

• Added a component to skweb
• Shipped a small feature in the iOS app
• Increased test coverage of a skweb page
• Found and filed a bug on skweb

Large amount of experience in one area (application, service, domain, technology, stack, etc).

Able to identify and communicate problems with technology, and investigate potential causes; able to suggest improvements to technology and tools and investigate implementations.

Example behaviours:

• Investigated flakey tests on Jenkins, and shared output from initial investigation
• Extracted functionality shared by several skweb pages into its own component
• Increased accounts-service test coverage

Large amount of experience in multiple areas.

Able to identify and communicate problems with technology, investigate potential causes, propose solutions/next steps, and proactively inform the team of changes; able to investigate improvements to technology and tools and plan implementations.

Able to identify tech areas that require ownership/ improvement.

Understands the impact of technology choices on the team.

Follows the scout rule.

Example behaviours:

• Investigated adding Jasmine to skweb, and shared results with the team
• Refactored a module in a service before adding functionality to it to make it more testable
• Took ownership of the firefighting process
• Made a plan to add Jasmine to skweb, shared with the Architects for feedback, worked with the team to roll-out, and shared results
• Researched and put together a plan for migrating skweb to Webpack
• Wrote and published the songkick-queue gem
• Researched and chose a technology for the new feature on Tourbox
• Did some technical feasibility work for a proposed new feature and fed back findings to the team

Keeps up with industry best practices.

Understands the technical challenges of the product teams.

Enables other developers to work more effectively.

Encourages developers to own investigations and proposals for fixes and improvements.

Expert in a domain; understands the impact of technology choices on the company.

Has a solid understanding of entire technology ecosystem.

Example behaviours:

• Planned and executed UTF-encoding DB migration

Expert across multiple domains.

Aware of the impact tools and tech have on dev team productivity and happiness.

Able to identify problems with technology, and encourage the Architects to own investigations and proposals for fixes.

Understands the technical challenges of the technology team.

Example behaviours:

• Moved company tech stack to a new infrastructure
• Planned and executed moving to service-oriented architecture