CircleCI Blog

Happy International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month from everyone at CircleCI! We recently launched a framework for employee resource groups (ERGs) to serve the richly diverse interests within our organization. Today we want to share our newest ERG, CircleSHEi, tell you about how this group came together, and share some notes from the kickoff mixer we enjoyed together this week.

Every engineer deserves a clear growth path so they can understand, plan, and execute on meaningful career growth. Providing a framework for this growth (we call ours a competency matrix; it’s also known as a career ladder, or professional development ladder) is important work, and the responsibility of any organization that wants to nurture and grow its employees.

Over the last year, we have made some critical shifts in our understanding of what we believe makes a great engineering manager at CircleCI, and learned a lot about our needs and values as an organization along the way. We’ve changed our hiring process substantially, and through these efforts we’ve hired some fabulous people, doubling our engineering management team. Today, we want to share all these learnings with you.

In June, CircleCI announced the opening of our Japanese office. One of the primary goals of this new office is to build a stronger community in Japan. In line with that effort, last Saturday, we hosted our first-ever hackathon in Tokyo.

The focus of the hackathon was very simple: learning orbs by actually writing orbs!

Note from the author: this post was written in collaboration with Justin Cowperthwaite, engineering manager, with additional input from Jeff Palmer, VP Engineering.

We want CircleCI to be a place that all engineers can learn and grow, and be supported no matter what level they join us at, or how they want to shape their careers. To support this, we use an engineering competency matrix, a framework that outlines expectations and growth paths for engineers. This matrix is a tremendously useful tool for us: it informs the structure of our job descriptions and our interview processes. It helps us set expectations together with our engineers, is a basis for goal setting as well as conversations about learning and development. It helps us have more objective performance conversations which are less susceptible to the biases and skills of an engineer’s manager. Overall, it clarifies the vision of our organization and helps us maintain consistency throughout all stages of hiring and professional development.

Software engineers come into this world as blank slates–empty vessels to be filled with facts, yes, but mainly opinions. Opinions are the carbohydrates of programming: they have little nutritional value but occupy space, leaving you with a remarkable feeling of (false) satiety.