¶ Intro / Opening
Cool. All right. We had a plan for this one, I remember. What was the plan? We didn't have a plan. I thought we had a plan because we said, oh, yeah, we'll just do it. We'll bang out a 30-minute show. We have an idea. That's as much of a plan as we had. That was the plan? Yeah.
¶ Understanding Career Levels and Progression
I have thought about something that we could talk about. What do you got? The paper that we're doing? No. Career stages at Microsoft. Career developer path. I was on a live TikTok yesterday. playing Hollow Knight, and someone said that they just got principal at Microsoft. Congratulations to that person. And they wanted to know what they should do, what their career stage progression should be, and if the only way to move up was management.
Yeah. Thoughts? I think the challenge is that people don't recognize there is luck. And I don't mean luck in like being called to serve and like, oh, you're awesome. Here, I'll promote you. But like... Sometimes you get good projects, sometimes you don't. Sometimes your projects get canceled and sometimes they don't. So I acknowledge that there is, like I hitched my wagon to .NET and there was some luck involved in that. So I thought you were saying...
the problem with us talking about this is that, but now you're just, seems like that's a great point to discuss. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Career stages. No, but you think it's, because I said it's, what do you think of that topic? And then you said, well, the problem is blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, well, I apologize. I always put everything as the problem is. It is, the challenge is that you want to give good advice. This podcast, when you talk to people, but...
Advice is not a guarantee of success. That's the challenge. Not everyone gets promoted, and that is challenging. The myth of the meritocracy is a larger concept. But I like the idea of career stages. And within the context of the paper that we're doing that we're not going to talk about, the idea of when does that feeling of seniorness happen? And when is that feeling of I can now lead a team happen? And I remember how I went through it in the 90s. So I still feel raw.
Well, so I think we'll have to lean on you because I had a very unorthodox path. You did. So I didn't go through career stages at Microsoft. I see them. Have you pretty much been the same level since you got acquired? I came in as a CVP, yeah. That's a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. So I came in at senior out of 63, but it was 18 years ago. And what I think is interesting about it is that I was the chief architect at a publicly traded company with 400 engineers.
And I came in as a 63. Yeah. And then people will tell you, like, well, you came in, for people who don't know. You must have interviewed poorly. What's that? You must have interviewed poorly. Probably, yeah. I think it was probably when I went through you and Don Box and they were like, this guy. They dropped me a couple of... Did I interview you? No, you didn't interview me. I didn't even remember. No, you did not. But the...
Leveling is challenging. And you can go to levels.fyi. It's a really great website where you can put stacks of levels and level ranges and level bands alongside Amazon and Meta and all the other tech companies and stuff like that. But how does one indicate... career stages. Now at Microsoft, we have this website, which is the career stage profiles.
website that actually describes how one solves problems at, or one is expected to solve problems at different levels, and the level of independence that one has. And I usually have thought about it in like a junior engineer. does good work, and a senior engineer helps junior engineers do good work, and a principal level engineer helps the division do good work.
partner level engineers, set the tone, set the architecture for the larger division. So your scope increases the higher you get. But Microsoft and big tech in general make these moments, these kind of like artificial like... hey, you're moving from engineer two to senior, and there's like the pregnant pause, or you're moving to principal, which is largely considered like one of the biggest.
¶ Pathways for Growth and Influence
biggest promos that someone can get. I don't know if you're ready. These kind of weird, squishy conversations can be really challenging. Well, I think that it sounds like what you're saying is there's really a gradual progression. 100%. I don't think that's the case when it comes to being recognized with a promotion. Okay, let's have that conversation. Well, like Partner is one of the most coveted bands to get into. Yeah, it's a tiny fraction. It's a big deal.
It's a small fraction of the company gets to partner level. And one of the defining properties of being a partner is that you're having broad scope influence. You mentioned, I think your levels of scope and influence were a little more aggressive than what I consider it. Like partner I see is now you're working across your larger product group. and likely interacting with other product groups to accomplish things. So you're starting to work across the company. Yep.
You're visible across divisions. You're bringing people together. I wouldn't even say it's across divisions, though. It doesn't necessarily have to be. It's just you show the ability to work from your silo across other teams that your silo interacts with that depends on. has to collaborate with or they depend on you to get things done. That's just one of the kind of simple definition of partner. But I think that...
You can continue to be a great developer and grow in skills and mentor people, but never get to that level because you're just, A, you don't have the opportunity to do it. Right. Like you said. Some of this is just luck and positioning yourself so that you do have the opportunities to go to the next level. And then there's also the IC route, which is I'm just going to become...
the most awesome expert at the area that I'm in, and it happens to be a very strategic area, and there's very few experts. And that is also a path to get to senior levels as a developer. Yeah. Where you're not even necessarily running across other product groups or the division or the company. Right. And if you're a developer, there's the...
I'm going to be a top 1% developer and I'm going to sling more code, faster code, better code and invent new concepts, new ideas, new businesses as an individual contributor. And then there's the... I am a developer or an engineering manager who is able to get herd cats to do same. Those are very different things. Like developer managers, engineering managers are very different than...
the mythical 10x developer that I'm not a huge fan of that topic. I also think it's important to point out that just because you plateau at a level doesn't mean that you're failing. And we've got examples of... people that are publicly known figures at Microsoft that have been here for 30 years that have plateaued in level, but they're still very productive and very impactful. It's just that they don't have the ambition to move.
to take down that bigger scope they're happy doing what they're doing and so that's where they are yeah and people ask them that they'll call that a terminal level like principle is a perfectly reasonable terminal level Because the responsibility and the throat to choke, who's the person that gets in trouble when something goes wrong? See, it happens to everybody. Yeah, it does. When things happen, when...
When someone gets in trouble and who's going to own that, that happens at the higher levels. And I've had situations where I've had to be the spokesperson or the one who apologizes for stuff that a vendor did or something that had nothing to do with me, but I'm ultimately the one that set the system up.
that's an uncomfortable position and not everyone wants to do that. Some people just want to write some code and have fun doing it. I think that one thing that doesn't get talked about enough is the level of the importance of communication. It's one thing to be a person who can write code and express intent to the computer accurately, but then also being to express intent to your coworkers in a way that makes what you're trying to accomplish well understood.
Well, we touched on this in our Influence episode where if you're not able to communicate, that's going to severely cripple your effectiveness because you become a one-man shop as opposed to... building on top of the work of others and getting them to come along with you and contribute. Yeah. When someone is doing work for you... Or rather one-person shop. One-person shop, indeed. You assign tasks. You speak clearly, you...
¶ Quantifying Impact for Advancement
Say, I need XYZ done. You give them a scope and an amount of time to get it done. How do you think about people who work for you and how they move through their careers? And when you say someone's ready to be promoted, is the promo a reward? for doing something or for executing reliably n times? And n plus one is why you get promoted? Yeah, this is kind of, it's an art, not a science, deciding when somebody is ready. And it also, you have to have...
business need, too. That's a key aspect of promotions at Microsoft. Does the role that they're in warrant that level of seniority? Because it's tough to move somebody into a partner ban. If they're not in a role to execute at partner level. Yeah, totally agree. And I think that's something that people need to understand. I'll make up a thing. I'm sure there's a person who owns this, but let's just pretend because I know the guy who used to own it. Yeah. The volume control.
in Windows. So you're the dev 2 or the PM2, which is a one level below senior, who owns the volume control. And you're killing it. And the audience loves it. And it's reliable. And it has zero crashes. And it does what it needs to do. Great. Can that get you senior and principal and partner and VP? You're not going to be the VP of the volume control. Yeah.
That's where you need to start looking laterally for additional scope. Maybe it's the audio subsystem. Maybe it's new innovative ways of thinking about inputs and outputs and software-based audio routing. You have to go start looking for problems. Have you ever heard this idea that at the principal level, you're looking for problems and bringing problems and solutions to management rather than waiting around for tasks? Yeah, good point on that one. One of the...
questions that I'm sure you get a lot, and actually you've had it because we've discussed it, is ICs and those distinguished titles that we've got. Yeah. And what you need to do to get them. And you talked about this too. To move up in levels of developer, do you need to be a manager? Well, we want to say, no, you don't have to be a manager to raise and...
level at Microsoft, and we've got these distinguished titles that are specifically incent individual contributions at the highest levels. Those are distinguished engineer and technical fellow. Not to say you can't.
get to those levels with a team. But it's hard because what we're looking for is individual innovation that has impact. And it's the one case where we're focused on... recognizing the individual talent as opposed to you get rewarded a lot of times because you've done a great job with the team and you have other people saying you're doing a great job because you're helping everybody.
And that's generally a requirement to get promoted. But in these special cases, these distinctive titles, actually, we want to see the individual innovation. We want to see you being the leader, you being the thought leader, you being the hands-on person.
that made something happen. And that kind of ties with what you were talking about earlier, a question of, do you need to actually do something to get a promotion? And I'm sure you have had this, and I'm curious to hear any special cases where you're saying, Well, you know, you've done the last few years, you've done solid work. You've gotten above target impact in the work, which means that you're excelling.
And they're saying, okay, so am I ready for promotion? And you're like, well, this one project, it will have huge impact and it's not quite there yet. Or we haven't quite seen if it has the impact. And because... One of the things that we're told is don't reward based on activity, report based on action. So just because you ship something, that's a small factor in promotion discussion.
That thing you ship, did it actually change things in a positive way? Did it generate more revenue? Did it raise customer satisfaction? Did it get Microsoft into more accounts? That impact factor has to be there. Yeah. And the expectations of impact factor increase as you get higher. Like, I felt that I had a great year this year, as an example. I did specific things. I had a list of tasks. They all got done. But at my level...
They're like, yeah. Do the thing. You're doing a good job. So I'm like, man, why didn't I get exceeded expectations? It's because the expectations were high. And I did them. So it's challenging to exceed expectations the higher up you get. And we try to tell people that as they make those next level things is that it is a kind of, and I don't like this word, but it's a coopetition. There is implicit.
competition with your peers, but you're competing within this larger band. And when, you know, Anna and Bob are over here doing something revolutionary, they've launched a whole new product and it's on the front page of everything and everyone's talking about it.
People can feel left behind if they're, I don't know, working on the volume control on Windows. So you have to look for innovation in your space to balance out. Do you think right now people are worried, not just at Microsoft, but everywhere, that if it's not AI, then I'm not going to get promoted? I don't see that, actually. You don't see that? Because I think people would say conventional wisdom is if you're not doing that, then that's a problem. But I think...
engineering fundamentals, security fundamentals, stability and reliability are just as important and people should be rewarded for that as well. Well, that's just as important. What's the number one priority for Microsoft? Security. What's number two? Reliability. Yeah. Number three? I don't know. Maybe AI was fourth. Yeah, I think it's challenging because you don't see things on the front page of whatever magazine.
Security and reliability. Like it's all about AI, but you're absolutely right. I'm glad I got those right. Yeah, that was good. I'm impressed. Could have gone badly for me. So it could have really badly. I would embarrass public embarrassment and shame. Oh, yeah.
¶ Individual Contributor Distinguished Titles
Any more than usual. Yeah. So you touched on the, hey, do I need to manage to raise in levels of developer? And I get asked this all the time. I'm sure you do too. And you probably asked it as you rose up through Microsoft. Yeah. And I see it as a trade-off. If you manage, you've got direct influence as opposed to indirect influence that we talked about before if you're an IC. An IC, you're indirectly influencing, but you get to remain almost purely technical.
and hands-on in a way that as you're growing in seniority in the management track, you can't. And so, like I said, we want to encourage senior developers to stay focused on senior architecture and senior implementation. And so we've got this titles to show that Microsoft recognizes the value of that and wants to encourage it. And like I said, those are distinguished engineer and technical fellow. By the way, David Fowler just published a YouTube video.
interviewed interviewed yeah yeah he got interviewed and he's a distinguished engineer and he talks about his career growth at microsoft and he's an ic It was a great interview because he touches on a lot of these things that we're talking about. And he came as, what's significant about David Fowler is he came directly out of college as a level 59 and as an intern. So he has seen everything and has experienced it. And it's also worth noting, and maybe you can speak to.
this because he is a he is or maybe began the first the new generation of distinguished engineer because as I understand it a lot of distinguished engineers were
like somewhat academic, or they would ship a thing, but also publish a paper on a thing. But David is not known for publishing academic papers. His work is in the open source space. So I came in as a technical fellow and saw what the... titling criteria was back in 2006 and have seen it evolve over time and then was part of the reboot of it in like 2018 2017 where Satya and Kevin Scott said hey we want to refine
what it means to get these titles. So I was part of coming up with the new definition and now I'm on what's the custodian. I'm one of the custodians for the titles. So me and several other TFs from across the company. evaluate the nominations and make recommendations to Kevin to approve them or decline them. And one of the things that we saw was happening in the...
early days of Microsoft is it was very much you're an engineer, you're a tenant, we don't like the term 10x, but you're effectively a super high, highly productive engineer, providing a lot of impact and value. And so we'll recognize you as the distinguished engineer title. or the technical fellow title, which typically meant you're having just enormous, like you're a core part of defining what Windows is. And you're kind of very unique.
the value that you're providing for products. And for context, there's how many DEs and TFs? There's like 12 TFs and like 50 DEs? No, it's significantly more than that now. Okay. So there's probably 35-ish TFs and probably 50. DEs? Out of 200,000 or 300,000 employees. So it's pretty lofty. It's a couple of orders of magnitude. But with the reboot, what they wanted to say is, like I described it, focus on individual innovation and impact.
And we see all forms of this. Again, it's not a science. It's an art to say, is that the case? And for somebody like David Fowler, he came up with SignalR. He's come up, he's worked on .NET. He's done a lot of impactful things that... weren't academic publications, but hugely impactful to the developer division and our application platform. And shows just innovation and creativity and he gets things done and clears the obstacles and does it.
and has just been working at it that way for a long time. So sustained impact. So those kinds of factors. And he gets great recommendations from other people, referrals from other people that say he's a great person to work with and we love him and he's had huge impact. That kind of all rolls up. And yeah, then we have people that are more academic. They make a contribution in some much more narrow way. Kind of interesting thing is that Leslie Lamport. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people.
probably recognize that name, he's come up with one of the most fundamental concurrency protocols and logical clocks, synchronization. He's had just monstrous impact on the industry so much that he was awarded a Turing Prize. And he's been doing this since the late 1960s. I had him on my podcast. He's an ACM fellow. Yeah, and he actually retired from Microsoft about a year ago now. But he retired as a distinguished engineer, not even a technical fellow.
Wow. And it's because, yeah. But I just want to point out that it's a bunch of factors like how much did it directly impact Microsoft? How much of that innovation was at Microsoft while he was here?
That's a valid point. Well, he's a technical fellow from the ADCM, the Association of Computing Machinery perspective, but at Microsoft, maybe he didn't ship something in Windows. And you know that I have always had an aspiration to end my career with the title of Distinguished Engineer, but my challenge is that I am not...
in the engineering track. I'm a technical program manager. So I would need to switch tracks and invent something or do something or dramatically change in order to get that moniker. Even though my level... is the same from an HR perspective. This is a special thing for people of a certain track to have. It's quite unique. Yeah, and even people in that track, it's not like everybody in the track gets it, right? It's something to aspire to. Yeah, indeed.
¶ Objective Metrics for Special Titles
And one of the things that I think we struggled with was the change, this reboot, which we still feel today, even from people that are familiar with the old way of doing things at Microsoft, the old way these titles were awarded, which is you can have a senior person. who's technical, who's running a large org, and that org is shipping great product and has innovations in it. This person is seen as a very technical manager.
This person can get down into the guts of an architecture and actually point things out and make recommendations and might even be directly hands-on with it. And in the past, that's a distinguished engineer when they got to the right level. And these are tied, basically, as having minimum levels for the title. Meaning you've had this kind of impact, you would have been at that level for the impact itself.
This title is coming on top as recognizing these special individual innovation. They would have been in the past at Microsoft before the reboot of the titling been awarded these titles of DE or TF. because of that deep technical management. And that's no longer the case. Now that person, well, you're getting rewarded through their promotion to level 70 VP.
or level 80. And by the way, the VP title came out of our reboot because we said, hey, a lot of developers, they go for DE because that's visible. And otherwise, the promotion to level 70 is not visible. wasn't visible and so we decided to just make that formally visible that level level 70 as the VP level to release the pressure on oh I've got to have DE because I want people to know that I'm right
That I'm at that level. How do you, maybe this is too spicy for the podcast as we get towards the end here, but like, how does one prevent? people feeling like promotions or titles or both are popularity contests. Because when you rebooted this, you needed to come up with a way to express that this is not, oh, that person seems cool, let's promote them. It's got to be...
quantifiable? Well, one of the things that we do is look for as much objective evidence as possible that they're having that impact themselves. And there's some examples of materials that not everybody has, but are great supporting materials for making a case. This person has had individual technical innovation and impact with it is patents, research papers, internal architecture documents, and we're looking for primary authorship on them.
You know, not like you're part of a team and you're one of 10 people that did that patent or did that. We want to see, hey, your name was first on a lot of them, that it's really you. And the other one is references from other experts in the domain that you're working in. So typically DE or TF is very specialized in some area, like I know the Azure infrastructure, I know the hypervisor.
So we've had TDS and TFs promoted off of contributions to the hypervisor and the Windows kernel. So we're looking for other people that are in that area that are like, yeah, that person, they're the ones that came up with those ideas. They're the ones that have made these contributions. So it's a lot.
And you might say that's a popularity contest, but it's, again, looking at all of this material together to try to get as objective. Like, ideally, this would just be a math problem. You just plug the numbers in, up, DE. Of course, that's not really the way things work. So there is judgment calls made that we want to get as much objective information to support it as possible. That made me feel like there's opportunities at the base of the pyramid.
the hypervisor, concurrency algorithms, like, you know, you could reinvent algebra. And then there's opportunities at the peak of the pyramid, which is highly specialized, coming up with something really fundamental because the base, the peak of the pyramid ends up moving down. And, you know, what today's peak is, is tomorrow's base that we're all going to build on top of it. Well, there's, again, like Playwright, for example, or VS Code.
TF and DEs have been given for those kind, you know, those are individual contributions. Yeah, that's a great point. Interesting. This must be Scott and Mark learn to be distinguished.
¶ Key Lessons for Career Advancement
I thought we were already distinguished. Oh, so nice. All right. The bosses want us to wrap up. All right. So what did we discuss? What is our summary here? There's luck involved. There's individual contribution. There's doing the grind. You can't vibe your way into a storied career. Generally, making friends doesn't get you very far.
Like it can get you some ways, but at some point you need more than friends. So coasting on charm at that level gets caught pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah. It might get you somewhere, but it's not going to get you all the way. You know, by contrast, if you're hard to get along with, that makes it much harder for you to get recognized and promoted. Explains how you got here and you're the same woman.
I love our time together. Do you? It's on my connect. I'm required to enjoy this time. No, I do. I think it's important because I think we've seen before in the comments. We have people from all over who watch the show and talk about the show. But what I think is good about us hanging out is that these are the conversations that we have that we just happen to have a camera on.
And people are like, man, no one talks like this. No one tells us this stuff. I wish they would have told me that. Someone said the thing out loud. Those conversations are important, and I'm happy that we get to have them together. Yeah, I agree. Cool. Like and subscribe, kids. Smash that bell. Let us know if you like it in the chat.