Add more examples that highlight front-end skills

[rowanmanning]

A message from @taraojo in Slack highlights that the competencies currently feel like they lean towards requiring devops/backend skills. We need to add more examples to existing competencies which highlight front-end skills, especially now that we're no longer adding domain-specific competencies.

Tara Ojo, 2020-11-10 17:09 👋🏾 Hello, I was looking at the Mid-Senior1 part of the progression framework and noticed the technical examples seem more devops-y / back-end focused, does that mean those technical skills are more important for FT career progression over general front-end skills like accessibility or client-side performance? As an example Implements appropriate observability and monitoring when building a solution

My response, for full context on the Slack conversation:

Rowan Manning, 2020-11-11 09:24 Hey Tara, there’s a bunch of background here which I’ll go into, but the short answer is that no, the progression framework should not exclude someone who focuses more on front-end. Your comment highlights that maybe we need to add some better examples to other competencies.

The longer answer:

When we started work on the progression framework, we had the idea to produce a set of “core competencies” that would mostly be able to apply to any role within engineering. Different engineering teams at the FT require fairly different technical skill-sets (e.g. Customer Products vs FT Core) and we wanted an initial set of competencies that work for any engineer.

To help make ensure that we don’t miss the other more specific skills that are important to individual groups, we came up with the idea of “domain specific competencies”, a competency domain being something like “Front-End Engineer”. The intention was that each group can then subscribe to the competency domains that are relevant to their tech / what they need from their engineers. After running feedback sessions we decided to drop this idea. (see this comment onwards)

What was supposed to happen (and clearly hasn’t fully yet) is that we update the examples in the core competencies or adjust to competencies to help them apply to any role. In this specific case, it’d be great to get some references to more front-end technologies into the competencies.

An example of where we could do this is the mid–senior1 competency “Delivers high quality code and solutions” – in my mind a front-end interface isn’t high quality unless it’s accessible, so an example could go in here to highlight that.

On the existing competencies feeling a little back-end focused, if you’re a front-end focused person and one of these just isn’t achievable as part of your role then you do not have to provide evidence for that competency. Adding “This doesn’t apply to my role” is absolutely fine. In answering this, I was sure that we had this fact documented somewhere but I can’t find it so I’ll make sure there’s an item in the FAQ/how to use guide.

I’d still argue that as a front-end focused engineer it’s possible to provide evidence for some of these. For example “Implements appropriate observability and monitoring when building a solution” could be making sure that appropriate errors are captured in Sentry, or the work that Platforms did to monitor speed.

[rowanmanning]

While we're not going ahead with these competencies, Alice and I did draft separate domain-specific competencies for front-end and back-end. Some of these may help us to come up with examples for existing competencies: Domain-Specific Competencies sheet