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Team

If you’re reading this page, you probably want to know more about the actual development team at Tallwave. Maybe you’re considering joining us. Maybe you’re just curious. Maybe you already work here and just want a refresher. Regardless, here are the nuts and bolts of what it is like to be a developer here.

Read about the day to day stuff over here.

Your Career

Titles are a weird thing. Just the title alone can cause division. “How come I’m not a Senior Architect III and *Billy* is?” kind of things. We want to be thoughtful about how we approach this, and foster growth and a desire to improve as a developer. Additionally, title can be a shorthand to convey to each other and clients what level of experience someone may have.

Individual Contributor or Management?

You can move up in the company either as an individual contributor or as a manager. It’s important to explicitly point out that you do not need to become a manager to advance. Often times a great developer may make a poor manager. We don’t want that.

What is the difference anyway? At a basic level, managers manage people. They are responsible for hiring, retaining, growing, and if necessary, disciplining the people who report to them. Managers need to have very high degrees of empathy because a lot of the job is about people.

Read more about what these tracks look like for Individual Contributors and Management.

Parallel Tracks

The management track runs parallel to the individual contributor track:

As you can see the main difference is that Individual Contributor titles get longer, and Management titles get shorter.

You can switch between those tracks, but consider it similar to changing majors in college - fine to do once, maybe twice, but not necessarily a good signal if it’s too often. Management is a bit of a career reset too. A technical background will help, but the muscles required for a successful career in management differ from that of an IC. If you are curious about management, take a look at the Management page and the tracks on the right side of the Snowflake spectrum and ask yourself if those are areas you want to pursue, or already exhibit naturally.

What title is not

Title does not inflate anyone’s worth in the company. We’re a relatively flat organization and that benefits us. A Lead Developer is not necessarily anyone’s boss, though they should be demonstrating leadership. In fact, everyone can (and should) be demonstrating leadership, regardless of title.

There is no pressure to gain ‘rank’ just for the sake of doing so. If you’re happy as a Software Developer, that’s great. Keep it up. However, it can be pretty fulfilling to add some more arrows to your quiver.

Everyone on the dev team needs to carry themselves well, have empathy for others, and demonstrate our Core Values.

All developers will be able to perform code reviews and give constructive feedback.

The rest of these are more what you call guidelines, not actual rules.

Advancement

You’ve heard it said that you should dress for the job you want; and similarly, if you want to be a Senior Developer or a Manager, you should already be demonstrating the traits expected for those roles. In other words if you ask for a promotion, it shouldn’t cause your manager to hesitate.

You should also have a plan and some goals to be working towards, even if you are not looking for a promotion. Goals are tricky. Like estimating software in general, it’s quite easy to overestimate how much you can accomplish in a year’s time. And in our business, client work has a tendency to take up as much free time as possible, so while special consideration will be given if it’s been a particularly busy time, we need to strive to make forward progress.

Snowflake

Medium has a great tool for measuring career performance called Snowflake. It measures technical as well as interpersonal skills. We liked it so much we adopted it for the dev team at Tallwave. You can view the tool itself over here.

Snowflake is not currently tied to any official policies at Tallwave - it is more for feedback and performance planning. There are 16 Tracks, each with 5 tiers. Advancement through tiers gets progressively more difficult. The difference between a 4 and a 5 is significantly larger than between 1 and 2. The left most tracks are more technical in nature, and the right most are more people & relationship based. Individual Contributors will tilt towards the left and Managers towards the right, though a mix between the two is normal.

There will be a tension between what people are capable of doing versus what they are already demonstrating. A person should only be moved up a tier if they have consistently shown that they meet the criteria at that tier. And it should be noted the example behaviors and tasks are examples and not checklists.

Another sticky area is if a person has done certain things at a job before Tallwave. This will need to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Due to the nature of our work (and client work in general), developers simply may not get a chance to exercise some of the skills they possess, so some latitude is necessary.

1:1s

You will be having a one-on-one meeting regularly with your manager. This should be every week, barring illness or holiday. Half an hour is the norm, but these can definitely stretch out to longer should the need arise.

In the one-on-one you’ll discuss how you’re feeling. This is not a status update, though it may relate to the status of a project. How are you feeling? Happy? Stressed? Are you freaking out about something in particular?

We’ll also have conversations about various topics and ask specific questions, like “If you were CEO of this company, what would you change?”. This is so that you and your manager can get to get to know each other a little bit better and also to keep things fresh. You never know what might come out of that conversation.

From time to time you’ll review those goals and how progress is going to hit those.

General business info may be distributed via one on ones too. Like when we have a new cover letter for the TPS reports.

Diversity

A diverse set of views makes a company better. When we hire we consider diversity. That doesn’t mean we target a specifc skin tone or gender, but special care is taken to ensure that we are not a homogenous voice. This really isn’t a complicated subject, and therefore it’s a short paragraph.

Internship

We love interns! We are actively working on an internship program that we will enact some day. Stay tuned!