Creating a successful engineering ladder isn't about perfect documentation—it's about building trust and psychological safety. The best ladders are actively used by teams and trusted across the organization because they're built on a foundation of "trust but verify" principles and open communication. Treat your ladder like a business relationship with SLAs, acknowledge potential failure modes, and remember that its success hinges on whether both engineers and management share a common understanding of its terms.
Why your engineering ladder doesn't really matter, but team buy-in does.
I've been involved in numerous engineering ladder revamps throughout my career. I've witnessed excellent frameworks fail and simplistic ladders succeed. A good ladder isn't necessarily one with perfect documentation or comprehensive edge-case coverage, but rather one that is actively used by your team and trusted across the organization. The ladders pictured above don't look impressive, yet they're vital to our fishing industry. How do you ensure your ladder gains widespread adoption and organizational support?
What is a ladder?
At its core, a ladder is a framework to categorize people into groups and compensate them accordingly. However, it can be much more. A well-designed ladder can empower engineers to accurately self-evaluate and advocate for their growth path. It can be used to appropriately place new hires in the right role. At the team level, it can serve as a framework to equitably evaluate performance, which informs compensation and title decisions.
First, the ladder needs firm ground to stand on.
The ladder foundation
Managers often emphasize the benefits of ladders without addressing the uncomfortable core function: segmenting people and paying them differently. This presents challenges at both individual and team levels.
At the individual level, people typically struggle with acknowledging their own gaps or celebrating their successes. Both highlighting your achievements and sharing insecurities can be extremely uncomfortable in an unsupportive environment. This discomfort can cause people to behave differently than they would in normal work settings, creating challenging situations for managers. Even individuals who accurately assess their own performance may question whether others are evaluated with the same level of scrutiny.
At the team level, performance is more collaborative than many companies acknowledge. Managers are responsible for providing appropriate opportunities and fostering a high-performance environment with motivated collaborators. Ladders often fail to address performance within the context of challenging working conditions, such as opportunity gaps or interpersonal issues that can impede advancement. This asymmetry—where the company evaluates individuals without reciprocal evaluation—can generate conflict.
Based on these experiences, I believe ladders require a foundation built on two key elements:
Trust of the organization so that employees believe their investment in the ladder will yield results.
Psychological safety between managers and direct reports so they can discuss performance gaps, seek appropriate opportunities, and resolve interpersonal issues.
Before implementing a ladder, you must ensure that this foundation of organizational trust and psychological safety is robust, or your ladder will collapse.
1. Organizational trust
First, you should not simply ask team members to trust the organization. Instead, encourage them to build a relationship based on 'trust but verify.' An engineer wouldn't blindly trust an API that merely claimed to 'work well.' For a critical service, you would expect metrics like average response time, throughput limits, and uptime guarantees in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) incorporated into a business contract.
An effective exercise to build trust is to establish SLAs for this 'career advancement service.' Begin by discussing anticipated failure modes and your strategies for addressing them.
Examples of anticipated failures:
Categorizing people into a limited number of groups will inevitably result in some misplacements.
People at the upper or lower bounds of levels may experience frustration due to either struggling with broader scope responsibilities or being close to higher compensation.
Due to fundraising cycles or other company-wide events, promotion cycles may not occur as scheduled.
Evaluation inconsistencies may exist between different managers.
Based on these failure modes, we could establish SLAs such as:
Failure rate (frequency of mis-leveling)
Mean time to restore (how quickly mis-leveling is corrected once identified)
Response time (adherence to performance review schedules)
A qualitative metric such as "Do you believe you and your peers are evaluated fairly?"
The most critical aspect is demonstrating awareness of potential failures and your commitment to addressing them when they occur. This approach builds trust. Additionally, if you provide a mechanism for the team to verify that the ladder is being properly implemented, they can contribute more productively to improvements. For example, if candidates are frequently interviewed at incorrect levels (high 'failure rate'), you can target that specific issue rather than discarding the entire ladder system.
2. Psychological safety
The foundation of a learning culture is psychological safety—mutual respect and the ability to take risks without fear of negative consequences. When teams have psychological safety, they're more willing to acknowledge their mistakes and develop preventative measures. They're also more comfortable raising concerns and exploring innovative solutions.
The ladder implementation process presents an excellent opportunity to build psychological safety by demonstrating vulnerability to your team. Recent research suggests that sharing past experiences regarding feedback reception and discussing current development goals in a group setting contributes positively to team psychological safety.
If you're comfortable sharing in a group setting, tell your team about a time when you benefited from constructive criticism and identify areas where you're currently focusing your development efforts. This can initiate a valuable process where you openly discuss your improvement areas and welcome (and receive!) their assistance.
In more extensive one-on-one settings, I have utilized this list of questions by @rands to gain deeper insights. I share my responses with team members during one-on-ones to establish rapport and invite them to share theirs.
Stabilize the foundation
With a relatively safe and trusting environment established, you can articulate why the ladder is important. This helps make the ladder less intimidating, particularly for newer team members.
How to talk about the importance of the ladder
In the past, I insufficiently emphasized the business aspects of the ladder. Upon reflection, I would discuss the ladder in business terms, as I believe it fundamentally establishes a business relationship—and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. A ladder is an arrangement where the business compensates individuals who can provide services the organization anticipates needing in the future.
A ladder helps define the parameters of that business relationship. Both the capabilities that a business requires and individuals' competencies evolve over time. The ladder and broader performance process provide an opportunity to reassess and adjust the terms of that relationship. For example, when an employee develops and can deliver more value or better services that the business needs, their compensation should increase accordingly.
How does the ladder work?
Ladder placement involves gathering data from three sources:
External information such as certifications, years of experience, or educational background to gain insight into life experiences that may help the company anticipate challenges.
Peer assessments of demonstrated skills. Independence exemplifies this well. While solitary work is generally not ideal, the ability to deliver substantial features independently enables contributions to new project initiation. Thus, an engineer who demonstrates independence may provide greater value to a company than someone who cannot work autonomously.
Self-assessment.
Above all, remember that a ladder is not personal—you are not defined by your work. This is business.
What's next?
A ladder's success isn't determined by its ability to articulate career levels, but by whether both the team and management trust it and share a common understanding of its terminology. Can the team trust that fulfilling the ladder requirements will lead to timely promotion? Can managers trust that the team actually uses it? Can both parties trust that people are leveled consistently across teams, regardless of gender, race, or company tenure?
Continue to ask these questions and pursue ongoing improvement.
Ladder references
A competency matrix/ladder should undergo continuous improvement. I recommend reviewing the ladder references below as potential starting points. You can then customize the ladder to meet your specific needs and update it as those needs evolve.
This post argues that building successful software for value-based care (VBC) requires a shift in mindset: create a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, not just a better Electronic Health Record (EHR). VBC realigns healthcare incentives around long-term patient outcomes, succeeding through proactive, relationship-based care rather than transactional services. Technology's role is to support this relationship by helping care teams orchestrate interventions effectively. The most valuable tools are often simple and pragmatic, focusing on the unique, core needs of the care model and enabling proactive management of patient health.
Reflections on pausing the contextual recommendation tool, Kelp, concluding that its goal—getting people the right information at the right time—is nearly impossible for a third-party app to achieve. The core problem is technical: without deep, OS-level access to user data and behavioral signals, recommendations remain mediocre. True contextual help must be built into the operating system itself. The key business takeaway was the need to solve a highly specific, paying use case for a narrow audience before attempting a broad, cross-platform solution.
This reflection on leadership in a hyper-growth startup argues that self-management is the most crucial skill. Management in such a chaotic environment is inherently reactive and emotionally draining, not strategic and proactive. The key to effectiveness is to abandon "ruinous empathy"—the futile attempt to please everyone—and instead fiercely conserve personal energy for high-impact moments. This is achieved by accepting failure and tradeoffs as constant, communicating them transparently, and focusing on maximizing success in key areas rather than fighting every fire.
Brooklyn homeownership is not "worth it" as a financial investment. After accounting for renovation costs, high transaction fees, and the opportunity cost of not investing in the stock market, my profitable-on-paper sale was actually a financial loss. The true costs were the non-financial headaches: months of living in construction dust, battling city bureaucracy over permits, and fixing bank errors over property liens. I conclude that you buy a home not for the return, but for the control and satisfaction of making a space your own.
