Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap

Seven years after Rent the Runway popularized open-sourcing engineering ladders, many organizations, including Honeycomb, have re-evaluated their approach to job promotions, which traditionally tied advancement to the "area of scope." At Honeycomb, there's a growing belief that valuing scope alone creates unfair incentives, as it rewards engineers who undertake the largest projects without necessarily addressing the company's most crucial problems. To counteract this, Honeycomb introduced a new career progression framework called PSHE (problem, solution, how, and execution), originally developed by YouTube's product team, which emphasizes both scope and ownership. This new framework allows for career growth not solely based on project size but also on problem-solving and execution capabilities. Honeycomb's revised job ladder, although not yet open-sourced due to copyright complexities, now incorporates visual tools to illustrate its principles, focusing on growth through both scope and ownership dimensions to reflect company values and support engineers' development.