@nat One comment on your draft on management at Pivotal:

But Labs still needed mentors to help develop new consultants – so you see this very mentorship-focused management system develop.

Not sure if my experience was out of the ordinary here, but I didn’t really think of my manager as being there for mentorship. Some did wind up being mentors in some form or fashion, but they were generally too far removed from the work and I received more mentorship from more senior engineers on my team.

Looking forward to the revised post on this, also - will be great to have a resource to point people to when I talk about the Pivotal [engineering] management structure.

@alpha @nat Haven’t read the draft, but I concur on the manager/mentor point Alpha makes, it was similar for me.

@christa @alpha Interesting! What did you get from your manager? What was your experience level when you joined?

@ratkins Interesting! What did you get from your manager? What was your experience level when you joined?

@nat Depended a lot on the context - my situation wasn’t really terribly normal (though that seems to be somewhat par for the course for Labs), since I was one of the first hires for the second iteration of the Seattle office (or first, depending on how you count). My managers ranged from the OD to the anchor on my first project to effectively an AD to the design lead at our office. I’m not sure I’d consider any a “mentor” as a role, although they all played parts in mentoring as an activity, if that makes sense?

As far as experience level, I was brought on as a “software engineer” - IIRC, Labs only came out with more real levels shortly after I joined. I remember getting a pretty good bump in comp when that happened. My memory of actual promos though is somewhat hazy, but I believe I left as a 5? And I probably had 2 or 3 promotions during my tenure, so seems plausible that I was leveled into a 3 but probably brought on as an expected 2? (Which would make sense, considering my professional experience at that point was SDET at Microsoft for 7 years and then a Ruby dev for 2.)

@nat A communication channel to upper management and feedback on my work. I joined as P3 (where Labs engineers topped out, but that’s another story) so quite senior.

@alpha @nat Hang on, what was the top IC level ar Labs? I thought it was P5 and there was literally one of them, who’d been hired at that level, and there were a handful of P4s.

@ratkins @alpha @nat Reasonably certain it was P6. P1 was junior, P2 was intermediate, P3 was senior, P4 was staff, P5 was principal, P6 was senior principal IIRC.

@ipsi @alpha @nat Ah, I’m one down then. I started at P4, there were a handful of P5s in labs (all who’d been hired at that level?) and no P6s.

@ratkins @ipsi @nat Yeah, I’m pretty sure P6 was the highest level, and there were not a lot of P5s in Labs, though it felt like there were a ton in AppTx, which made our office pretty salty since the ones we worked with were on par with our P4s.

IIRC, we had one P5 in our office, and I specifically acquiesced to a practice lead position w/one of our gov engagements to get there.

@ratkins @ipsi @nat Oh, wait, I think we had two P5s - forgot that one was hired in at that level.

@alpha This is great, thanks.