Data from [https://snowflake.medium.com/]
- Mobile
- Works effectively within established iOS or Android architectures, following current best practices
- Develops new instances of existing architecture, or minor improvements to existing architecture
- Designs major new features and demonstrates a nuanced understanding of mobile platform constraints
- Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices and enable engineers to work more effectively
- Is an industry-leading expert in mobile engineering or sets strategic mobile direction for an eng team
- Servers
- Works effectively within established server side frameworks, following current best practices
- Develops new instances of existing architecture, or minor improvements to existing architecture
- Designs standalone systems of moderate complexity, or major new features in existing systems
- Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices for other engineers, or multi-system services
- Is an industry-leading expert in server side engineering or sets strategic server side direction for an eng team
- Foundations
- Works effectively within established structures, following current best practices
- Develops new instances of existing architecture, or minor improvements to existing architecture
- Designs standalone systems of moderate complexity, or major new features in existing systems
- Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices for other engineers, or multi-system services
- Is an industry-leading expert in foundational engineering or sets strategic foundational direction for an eng team
- Web client
- Works effectively within established web client architectures, following current best practices
- Develops new instances of existing architecture, or minor improvements to existing architecture
- Designs major new features and demonstrates a nuanced understanding of browser constraints
- Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices and enable engineers to work more effectively
- Is an industry-leading expert in web client or sets strategic web client direction for an eng team
- Project management
- Effectively delivers individual tasks
- Effectively delivers small personal projects
- Effectively delivers projects through a small team
- Effectively delivers projects through a large team, or with a significant amount of stakeholders or complexity
- Manages major company pushes delivered by multiple teams
- Communication
- Communicates effectively to close stakeholders when called upon, and incorporates constructive feedback
- Communicates with the wider team appropriately, focusing on timeliness and good quality conversations
- Proactively shares information, actively solicits feedback, and facilitates communication for multiple stakeholders
- Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization
- Influences outcomes at the highest level, moves beyond mere broadcasting, and sets best practices for others
- Craft
- Delivers consistently good quality work
- Increases the robustness and reliability of codebases, and devotes time to polishing products and systems
- Improves others' ability to deliver great quality work
- Advocates for and models great quality with proactive actions, and tackles difficult and subtle system issues
- Enables and encourages the entire organization to make quality a central part of the development process
- Initiative
- Identifies opportunities for organizational change or product improvements
- Causes change to positively impact a few individuals or minor improvement to an existing product or service
- Causes change to positively impact an entire team or instigates a minor feature or service
- Effects change that has a substantial positive impact on the engineering organization or a major product impact
- Effects change that has a substantial positive impact on the whole company
- Org design
- Respects and participates in processes, giving meaningful feedback to help the organization improve
- Identifies opportunities to improve existing processes and makes changes that positively affect the local team
- Develops processes to solve ongoing organizational problems
- Thinks deeply about organizational issues and identifies hidden dynamics that contribute to them
- Leads initiatives to address issues stemming from hidden dynamics and company norms
- Accomplishment
- Helps individuals identify blockers and helps them identify next steps for resolution
- Helps individuals resolve difficult performance issues, with insight, compassion, and skill
- Intervenes in long-standing performance issues with targeted behavior change or performance plans
- Mediates escalated situations, empowers underperforming teams, and resolves conflict
- Resolves complex organizational dysfunction, or persistent conflict at senior levels
- Wellbeing
- Uses tools and processes to help ensure colleagues are healthy and happy
- Creates a positive, supportive, engaging team environment for group members
- Manages expectations across peers, leads in the org, promotes calm, and prevents consensus building
- Advocates for the needs of teams and group members, and proactively works to calm the organization
- Manages narratives, channels negativity into inspiration and motivation, and protects the entire team
- Career development
- Gives insight into opportunities and helps identify individuals' strengths and weaknesses
- Formally supports and advocates for one person and provides tools to help them solve career problems
- Inspires and retains a small group of people and actively pushes them to stretch themselves
- Manages interactions and processes between groups, promoting best practices and setting a positive example
- Supports the development of a signficant part of the engineering org, and widely viewed as a trusted advisor
- Evangelism
- Represents Medium well externally, and influences individuals positively
- Participates more centrally in small events, and takes simple actions that positively influence groups of people
- Works hard to positively influence large groups of people on their views of Medium
- Establishes Medium as an great, innovative company and workplace to the whole industry
- Introduces Medium in a positive light to a wider audience outside the industry
- Community
- Is available and present on current teams, and works to contribute positively to company culture
- Steps up, builds connectedness, and takes concrete actions to promote an inclusive culture
- Contributes to improving team relatedness, and helps build a culture of lending support
- Exemplifies selflessness for the team without compromising responsibilities, and lifts everyone up
- Lives the company values, guards positive culture, and defines policies that support relatedness between teams
- Recruiting
- Brings new candidates into the pipeline and understands how to evaluate candidates at Medium
- Interviews regularly, helps the team make meaningful hiring decisions, and helps build a diverse pipeline
- Maintains and strengthens the integrity of the current process, and regularly brings in great candidates
- Actively contributes to and leads hiring decisions, and goes to great lengths to source great candidates
- Sets recruitment strategy, invests in long-term relationships for critical roles, and recruits at scale
- Mentorship
- Informally mentors individuals in an ad-hoc way, supports new hires, and conveys institutional knowledge
- Mentors people proactively, and guides people to realizations rather than providing the answer
- Teaches small groups of engineers and contributes to Medium's shared knowledge base
- Encourages people to mentor each other, and creates ways for them to do so
- Instills and promotes a culture of learning and development within the team
- Delivers features requiring simple local modifications
- Adds simple actions that call server endpoints
- Reuses existing components appropriately
- Added existing button to a different iOS surface
- Add follow button for publications on Android
- Fetched and displayed a new stream, using existing stream item styles
- Defines new useful and appropriate proto-generated objects
- Creates simple new activities on Android
- Migrates code from old patterns to new patterns
- Upgraded SDWebImage to a new major version
- Added support for rendering a new type of stream item
- Prototyped a simple new feature quickly
- Implements complex features with a large product surface area
- Works effectively with Android reactive programming framework
- Adds support for new iOS features after a major iOS version upgrade
- Designed iOS caching strategy for offline reading
- Built series reader on Android
- Informed the team about recent best practice changes and deprecations
Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices and enable engineers to work more effectively
- Pioneers architecture migration strategies that reduce programmer burden
- Fixes subtle memory management issues
- Implements interactive dismissals that bring delight
- Upgraded CocoaPods to a new major version
- Designed architecture for fetching and rendering stream items
- Migrated Android persistance layer to reactive programming
Is an industry-leading expert in mobile engineering or sets strategic mobile direction for an eng team
- Defines long-term goals and ensures active projects are in service of them
- Designs and builds innovative, industry-leading UI interactions
- Invents new techniques to responsibly stretch limits of the Android platform
- Defined and drove complete migration plan to Swift or Kotlin
- Implemented Android recycler views before platform support existed
- Pioneered application-level abstractions for multi-app environment
- Adds NodeJS endpoints using layers architecture
- Adds golang endpoints using Gotham architecture
- Makes minor server changes to support client needs
- Added IFTTT trigger for new bookmark to medium2
- Added delete audio route to Buggle
- Queried a Dynamo LSI appropriately
- Assesses correctness and utility of existing code and avoids blind copy-pasting
- Generalizes code when appropriate
- Determines data needs from product requirements
- Identified need for new index on Dynamo
- Acted as caretaker for routes protos
- Updated Facebook API version and codebase dependencies
- Acts as primary maintainer for existing critical systems
- Integrates third party services effectively
- Writes playbooks for new service maintenance
- Implemented Google Auth login to Medium
- Implemented payments integration with Stripe
- Built Textshots server
Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices for other engineers, or multi-system services
- Delivers complex systems that achieve their goals
- Avoids subtle architectural mistakes when considering new systems
- Makes appropriate buy vs build choices
- Designed Medium's ranked feed architecture
- Designed custom domains architecture
- Created Gotham framework for creating Go services
Is an industry-leading expert in server side engineering or sets strategic server side direction for an eng team
- Designs transformational projects of significant complexity and scope
- Makes decisions that have positive, long term, wide ranging consequences
- Identifies and solves systemic problems with current architecture
- Researched, vetted, and selected Go as Medium's statically typed language
- Defined microservices architecture and medium2 migration plan
- Defined and implemented proprietary IP core to the company's success
- Writes thorough postmortems for service outages
- Makes simple configuration changes to services
- Performs backfills safely and effectively, without causing pages
- Made safe and effective Ansible changes
- Implemented new ETL pipelines based on existing ones
- Resolved out of disk errors independently
- Made minor version upgrades to technologies
- Builds machine learning jobs within the ML framework
- Triages service issues correctly and independently
- Upgraded NodeJS from 8.0 to 8.1.1
- Built custom packages for RPMs
- Improved ETL efficiency by improving Dynamo to S3 loading
- Acts as primary maintainer for existing critical systems
- Designs moderately complex systems
- Makes major version upgrades to libraries
- Designed Ansible configuration management
- Built Medium's realtime stats pipeline
- Designed flexible framework for writing machine learning jobs
Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices for other engineers, or multi-system services
- Designs complex projects that encompass multiple systems and technologies
- Demonstrates deep knowledge of foundational systems
- Introduces new databases and technologies to meet underserved needs
- Designed and built BBFD
- Designed AWS configuration management
- Introduced Kinesis and pioneered streaming events pipeline
Is an industry-leading expert in foundational engineering or sets strategic foundational direction for an eng team
- Designs transformational projects in service of long-term goals
- Defines the strategic vision for foundational work and supporting technologies
- Invents industry-leading techniques to solve complex problems
- Invented a novel ML technique that advanced the state of the art
- Defined and developed Medium's continuous delivery strategy
- Developed and implemented HA strategy
- Makes minor modifications to existing screens
- Fixes simple design quality issues
- Uses CSS appropriately, following style guide
- Implemented sticky footer on the post page
- Hooked up the action to dismiss a post from a stream
- Built PaymentHistory screen using ResponseScreen
- Makes sensible abstractions based on template and code patterns
- Specs and builds interactive components independently
- Prototypes simple new features quickly
- Built credit card input component
- Created shared buttons template
- Built modal system
- Provides useful design feedback and suggests feasible alternatives
- Performs systemic tasks to significantly minimise bundle size
- Acts a caretaker for all of web client code
- Designed font loading strategy for Medium
- Researched utility of service workers for Medium
- Designed and implemented ResponseScreen
Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices and enable engineers to work more effectively
- Pioneers architecture migrations that reduce programmer burden
- Implements complex UI transitions that bring delight
- Makes architectural decisions that eliminate entire classes of bugs
- Designed Medium's post morpher and delta system
- Implemented Medium's scrolling text over image blur
- Designed and pioneered proto-based model storage
- Invents new techniques to innovate and overcome browser constraints
- Identifies and solved systemic problems with current architecture
- Defines a long-term vision for web client and ensures projects are in service of it
- Invented CSS in JS
- Defined and drove migration strategy to Lite
- Implemented unidirectional data flow to completion
- Estimates small tasks accurately
- Delivers tightly-scoped projects efficiently
- Writes effective technical specs outlining approach
- Wrote the technical spec for featured post images
- Delivered stream item support for email digests
- Delivered payment history dashboard
- Performs research and considers alternative approaches
- Balances pragmatism and polish appropriately
- Defines and hits interim milestones
- Delivered promo editor
- Delivered audio uploading for web client
- Executed the recommends to claps backfill
- Delegates tasks to others appropriately
- Integrates business needs into project planning
- Chooses appropriate project management strategy based on context
- Ran project retro to assess improvement opportunities
- Completed launch checklist unprompted for well controlled rollout
- Facilitated project kickoff meeting to get buy-in
Effectively delivers projects through a large team, or with a significant amount of stakeholders or complexity
- Finds ways to deliver requested scope faster, and prioritizes backlog
- Manages dependencies on other projects and teams
- Leverages recognition of repeated project patterns
- Oversaw technical delivery of Hightower
- Managed infrastructure migration to VPC
- Involved marketing, legal, and appropriate functions at project start
- Considers external constraints and business objectives when planning
- Leads teams of teams, and coordinates effective cross-functional collaboration
- Owns a key company metric
- Managed technical migration to SOA
- Lead technical delivery of 10/7
- Delivered multi-month engineering project on time
Communicates effectively to close stakeholders when called upon, and incorporates constructive feedback
- Communicates project status clearly and effectively
- Collaborates with others with empathy
- Asks for help at the appropriate juncture
- Updated The Watch before running a backfill
- Updated project status changes in Asana promptly
- Gave thoughtful check-in and check-out comments
Communicates with the wider team appropriately, focusing on timeliness and good quality conversations
- Practises active listening and suspension of attention
- Ensures stakeholders are aware of current blockers
- Chooses the appropriate tools for accurate and timely communication
- Received and integrated critical feedback positively
- Created cross-team Slack channel for payments work
- Spoke to domain experts before writing spec
Proactively shares information, actively solicits feedback, and facilitates communication for multiple stakeholders
- Resolves communication difficulties between others
- Anticipates and shares schedule deviations in plenty of time
- Manages project stakeholder expectations effectively
- Directed team response effectively during outages
- Gave a substantial Eng All Hands presentation on React
- Gave notice of upcoming related work in Eng Briefing
Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization
- Communicates project risk and tradeoffs skillfully and with nuance
- Contextualizes and clarifies ambiguous direction and strategy for others
- Negotiates resourcing compromises with other teams
- Lead off-site workshop on interviewing
- Wrote Medium's growth framework and rationale
- Aligned the entire organization around claps
Influences outcomes at the highest level, moves beyond mere broadcasting, and sets best practices for others
- Defines processes for clear communication for the entire team
- Shares the right amount of information with the right people, at the right time
- Develops and delivers plans to execs, the board, and outside investors
- Organized half year check-in company offsite
- Created the communication plan for a large organizational change
- Presented to the board about key company metrics and projects
- Tests new code thoroughly, both locally, and in production once shipped
- Writes tests for every new feature and bug fix
- Writes clear comments and documentation
- Caught a bug on Hatch before it went live
- Landed non-trivial PR with no caretaker comments
- Wrote hermetic tests for the happy and sad cases
Increases the robustness and reliability of codebases, and devotes time to polishing products and systems
- Refactors existing code to make it more testable
- Adds tests for uncovered areas
- Deletes unnecessary code and deprecates proactively when safe to do so
- Requested tests for a PR when acting as reviewer
- Reduced the number of zelda fitzgerald exceptions
- Fixed a TODO for someone else in the codebase
- Implements systems that enable better testing
- Gives thoughtful code reviews as a domain expert
- Adds tooling to improve code quality
- Improved PRB to run the same volume of tests faster
- Simplified hermetic test data modification
- Created fixture system for visual quality
Advocates for and models great quality with proactive actions, and tackles difficult and subtle system issues
- Builds systems so as to eliminate entire classes of programmer error
- Focuses the team on quality with regular reminders
- Coordinates Watch priorities and projects
- Added code coverage reporting to iOS CI pipeline
- Iterated repeatedly to develop Medium's underlines solution
- Defined and oversaw plan for closing Heartbleed vulnerability
Enables and encourages the entire organization to make quality a central part of the development process
- Defines policies for the engineering org that encourage quality work
- Identifies and eliminates single points of failure throughout the organization
- Secures time and resources from execs to support great quality
- Negotiated resources for Fix-It week with exec team
- Instituted and ensured success of a 20% time policy
- Started The Watch
- Writes Hatch posts about improvement opportunities
- Raises meaningful tensions in tactical meetings
- Asks leadership team probing questions at FAM
- Wrote about problems with TTR on Hatch
- Wrote about content policy problems on Hatch
- Reported a site issue in Github
Causes change to positively impact a few individuals or minor improvement to an existing product or service
- Picks bugs off the backlog proactively when blocked elsewhere
- Makes design quality improvements unprompted
- Takes on trust and safety tasks proactively when blocked elsewhere
- Advocated on own behalf for a change in role
- Implemented flow typing for promises
- Audited web client performance in Chrome and proposed fixes
- Demonstrates concepts proactively with prototypes
- Fixes complicated bugs outside of regular domain
- Takes ownership of systems that nobody owns or wants
- Defined style guide to resolve style arguments
- Proposed and implemented at-mentions prototype
- Implemented video for Android independently, unprompted
Effects change that has a substantial positive impact on the engineering organization or a major product impact
- Champions and pioneers new technologies to solve new classes of problem
- Exemplifies grit and determination in the face of persistent obstacles
- Instigates major new features, services, or architectures
- Created the interviewing rubric and booklet
- Implemented and secured support for native login
- Migrated medium2 to mono repo and bazel
- Creates a new function to solve systemic issues
- Galvanizes the entire company and garners buy in for a new strategy
- Changes complex organizational processes
- Migrated the organization from Holacracy
- Built Medium Android prototype and convinced execs to fund it
- Convinced leadership and engineering org to move to Medium Lite architecture
- Reflects on meetings that leave them inspired or frustrated
- Teaches others about existing processes
- Actively participates and makes contributions within organizational processes
- Facilitated effective tactical meeting with empathy
- Explained tactical meeting format to a new hire
- Provided feedback on sprint planning meeting
Identifies opportunities to improve existing processes and makes changes that positively affect the local team
- Defines meeting structure and cadence that meets team needs
- Engages in organizational systems thinking
- Advocates for improved diversity and inclusion, and proposes ideas to help
- Defined Frankenmeeting structure for small team
- Improved Watch on-call rotation scheduling
- Defined standard channels for inter-team communication
- Creates programs that meaningfully improve organizational diversity
- Solves long-standing organizational problems
- Reallocates resources to meet organizational needs
- Developed baseline team templates for consistency
- Created bug-rotation program to address ongoing quality issues
- Defined Guilds manifesto and charter
Thinks deeply about organizational issues and identifies hidden dynamics that contribute to them
- Evaluates incentive structures and their effect on execution
- Analyzes existing processes for bias and shortfall
- Ties abstract concerns to concrete organizational actions or norms
- Connected mobile recruiting difficulties to focus on excellence
- Raised leadership level change discrepancies
- Analyzed the hiring rubric for false negative potential
Leads initiatives to address issues stemming from hidden dynamics and company norms
- Builds programs to train leadership in desired skills
- Creates new structures that provide unique growth opportunities
- Leads planning and communication for reorgs
- Lead efforts to increase number of mobile engineers
- Directed resources to meaningfully improve diversity at all levels
- Built the growth framework rubric
- Notices when someone is stuck and reaches out
- Helps others break down problems into feasible, tangible next steps
- Talks through problems non-judgmentally
- Completed training on diagnosing problems
- Unblocked a group member
- Reinforces and affirms positive feedback for good work
- Gathers context outside the immediate problem
- Recognizes issues within local environment and suggests change
- Works to encourage ownership of actions and responsibilities
- Completed training on decision making
- Convinced a group member to solve a problem directly, rather than doing it for them
- Gave honest feedback about poor performance, with compassion
- Aggregates signals of poor performance and creates process for improvement
- Investigates motivation and externalities for consistent poor performance
- Puts together comprehensive, achievable performance plans
- Worked with group member to address persistent communication failures
- Arranged a transfer to another team, resulting in improved performance
- Managed group member closely to maximise chances of PIP success
- Recognizes heightened situations and toxic or aggressive interactions
- Inserts themself into conflict where appropriate to calm and mediate
- Encourages open dialog and builds trust between parties in conflict
- Empowered a team to drive forward amidst uncertainty
- Protected team from externalities so they could focus on goals
- Mediated sit-down between team members to address tension
- Takes control of dysfunctional teams to organise chaos
- Repairs broken team dynamics and builds harmony
- Presides over a well-oiled team of teams
- Turned around the performance of a problematic team
- De-escalated serious tensions between teams
- Rebuilt trust between senior team leads
- Keeps confidences unless legally or morally obliged to do otherwise
- Applies the reasonable person principle to others
- Avoids blame and focuses on positive change
- Ensured group members were taking enough vacation
- Put themself in another's shoes to understand their perspective
- Checked in with colleague showing signs of burnout
- Sheds light on other experiences to build empathy and compassion
- Validates ongoing work and sustains motivation
- Proposes solutions when teams get bogged down or lose momentum
- Coordinated a small celebration for a project launch
- Connected tedious A|B testing project with overall company goals
- Noted a team without a recent win and suggested some easy quick wins
- Trains group members to separate stimulus from response
- Maintains a pulse on individual and team morale
- Helps group members approach problems with curiosity
- Completed training on transference and counter transference
- Completed training on compromise and negotiation techniques
- Reframed a problem as a challenge, instead of a barrier, when appropriate
- Ensures team environments are safe and inclusive, proactively
- Grounds group member anxieties in reality
- Tracks team retention actively and proposes solutions to strengthen it
- Relieved org tension around product direction by providing extra context
- Encouraged group members to focus on what they can control
- Guided people through complex organizational change
Manages narratives, channels negativity into inspiration and motivation, and protects the entire team
- Recognizes and points out narratives when appropriate
- Works to reshape narratives from victimization to ownership
- Increases the psychological safety of the entire team
- Converted group member from a problem haver to a problem solver
- Challenged false narrative and redirected to compassion and empathy
- Cultivated and championed a culture of empathy within the entire team
- Advocates on behalf and in defense of a group member
- Shares opportunities for improvements and recognises achievements
- Explains appropriate available industry paths
- Collected and delivered feedback
- Discussed career options and areas of interest informally
- Hosted a Floodgate Academy intern
Formally supports and advocates for one person and provides tools to help them solve career problems
- Ensure a group member has an appropriate role on their team
- Offers effective career advice to group members, without being prescriptive
- Creates space for people to talk through challenges
- Set up and attended regular, constructive 1:1s
- Provided coaching on how to have difficult conversations
- Taught group members the GROW model
- Discusses paths, and creates plans for personal and professional growth
- Advocates to align people with appropriate roles within organization
- Works with team leads to elevate emerging leaders
- Reviewed individual group member progression every 6 weeks
- Suggested appropriate group member for Tech Lead position
- Arranged a requested switch of discipline for a group member
Manages interactions and processes between groups, promoting best practices and setting a positive example
- Manages team transitions smoothly, respecting team and individual needs
- Develops best practices for conflict resolution
- Ensures all group members' roles are meeting their career needs
- Completed training on situational leadership
- Built a resourcing plan based on company, team, and individual goals
- Prevented regretted attrition with intentional, targeted intervention
Supports the development of a signficant part of the engineering org, and widely viewed as a trusted advisor
- Supports and develops senior leaders
- Identified leadership training opportunities for senior leadership
- Pushes everyone to be as good as they can be, with empathy
- Provided coaching to group leads
- Devised Pathwise curriculum for group leads
- Advocated to execs for engineer development resources and programs
- Shares personal and organizational successes with their network
- Attends Medium-hosted events and talks with guests
- Communicates genuine and honest excitement about their work externally
- Shared a Medium product launch post on Facebook
- Acted as a guide for a non-friend visitor to the office
- Supported PR efforts by giving a quote or having a photo taken
Participates more centrally in small events, and takes simple actions that positively influence groups of people
- Takes meaningful action to introduce people to Medium
- Joined public Slack group and represented Medium appropriately, and well
- Organizes positive small- or medium-sized events that bring people to Medium
- Volunteered as a helper for CODE2040 writing workshop
- Organized a short tour of the office by college students
- Talked at a Women Who Code event hosted at Medium
- Mentors or participates in a high visibility way in an external organization
- Builds fruitful partnerships with external organizations
- Writes blog posts about Medium that receive moderate traffic
- Represented Medium on a panel at a conference of industry experts
- Established close ties with Creative Commons
- Built a durable, long-standing relationship with Code2040
- Establishes themself as an industry thought leader who attracts talent
- Publishes material about Medium's organizational or technical innovations
- Leverages significant following to evangelise Medium
- Published a paper on Medium technology in a peer-reviewed journal
- Authored joint-press release with EFF on DNT
- Published "Why Content Editable Is Terrible" on the Medium engineering blog
- Delivers key messages to broad, mainstream audiences
- Influences people with large audiences to talk about Medium positively
- Drives recognition and adoption of Medium in significant numbers
- Published or interviewed in a mainstream newspaper or website outside tech
- Keynoted a conference with international attention
- Represented Medium in national televised media
- Participates in team activities and offsites
- Treats colleagues and clients with respect
- Joins groups or committees outside regular duties
- Joined and actively participated in the web client guild
- Brought a small gift back from vacation for the team
- Wrote entertaining and informative Prod Ops writeups on Hatch
- Makes space for others to participate
- Collaborates with other engineers outside direct responsibilities
- Finds ways to ramp up and engage new hires quickly
- Created onboarding bingo
- Brought shy and introverted people into a dominant conversation
- Volunteered as secretary for a team
- Takes on additional Watch shifts at short notice
- Pitches in to help other teams hit deadlines, without missing own deadlines
- Uses position to raise difficult issues on someone's behalf
- Lead Watch cycles with little support while still contributing to projects
- Started and drove the LGBTQIA ERG
- Stayed positive and improved team morale during period after layoffs
- Goes above and beyond on the Watch, serving the team without complaint
- Implements concrete programs to signficantly improve team inclusivity
- Takes on large amounts of tedious grunt work for the team without being asked
- Devoted large amount of time to helping outside direct responsibilities
- Refactored hundreds of legacy Shepherd nodes
- Acted as sole maintainer of Boxen for years
Lives the company values, guards positive culture, and defines policies that support relatedness between teams
- Brings separate teams together to build relatedness
- Holds individuals, teams, and leadership accountable to Medium's values
- Sets the tone, policy, and goals around maintaining an inclusive company
- Organized wine and olive tasting offsite to Napa for the whole engineering org
- Devised, delivered and acted on findings from an engineer happiness survey
- Challenged and corrected exclusionary behaviour or policies
- Reviews existing network for hiring leads regularly
- Shadows interviews to gain familiarity with process
- Reviews current job postings regularly
- Completed interview calibration
- Set up casual sessions to practice asking questions
- Referred appropriate individuals for open positions
Interviews regularly, helps the team make meaningful hiring decisions, and helps build a diverse pipeline
- Uses interview rubric to provide clear, objective feedback on candidates
- Interviews candidates with empathy and treats them all with equal respect
- Researches approaches for sourcing candidates and diversifying hiring
- Added observable evidence for every rating
- Started a monthly brunch for candidates to meet Medium employees
- Tested a new service for quality and diversity of candidates
Maintains and strengthens the integrity of the current process, and regularly brings in great candidates
- Teaches new interviewers how to interview with empathy
- Models great interview technique and feedback when shadowed
- Reverse shadows trainees and helps calibrate their feedback
- Wrote new interview question which meets our question quality criteria
- Brought candidates into our pipeline proactively, with a high conversion rate
- Proposed useful, tangible improvements to the interview process
Actively contributes to and leads hiring decisions, and goes to great lengths to source great candidates
- Documents subtle cues in interviews that indicate values alignment
- Makes hiring decisions, resolving discrepancies between conflicting reports
- Top-grades candidates and teases out character traits
- Planned engineering summit on interview process and training
- Organized and lead Medium's presence at a recruitment fair
- Started CODE2040 internship program
Sets recruitment strategy, invests in long-term relationships for critical roles, and recruits at scale
- Sets the tone, policy and goals around building a diverse, high-quality team
- Identifies and brings in promising acquisitions
- Tracks industry activity, identifying opportunities for critical roles
- Talked with a senior candidate over many months to fill a critical role
- Organized efforts around convincing acquired engineers to join and stay
- Set goals, then tracked and reported metrics on team demographics over time
Informally mentors individuals in an ad-hoc way, supports new hires, and conveys institutional knowledge
- Makes themself available for informal support and advice
- Acts as sounding board for peers and more junior members
- Provides sound advice when asked
- Acted as an onboarding buddy
- Paired with an engineer to help them with an unfamiliar area
- Helped a colleague understand their feelings
- Takes time to explain concepts and best practices
- Asks questions to illuminate concepts, rather than stating them
- Allows others to lead efforts when it will help their development
- Shared interesting article with a team member to help with their growth
- Offered unprompted feedback to help growth, with empathy
- Lead from behind to support someone new to a leadership role
- Avoids siloing information when it can be usefully shared with others
- Works to increase the bus factor of systems
- Finds tools that work best for a team member's personality
- Gave a brown bag presentation on payments
- Wrote Hatch post on avoiding RDS backfill issues
- Wrote Medium-U content module
- Defines an entire curriculum for a discipline
- Draws positive attention to well-modeled mentor and teaching behaviours
- Creates brown bag series and lines up speakers
- Created and lead Medium's Women in Eng group
- Organized an Eng All Hands with an outside speaker
- Designed and taught web client guild curriculum
- Sets incentive structures to recognise and reward mentorship
- Empowers team members to develop themselves
- Role models productive and healthy mentor relationships
- Instituted the professional education budget for engineers
- Mentored mentors
- Started the eng advisor program and lined up external mentors