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Everyone wants a flat team structure... until they don't.

- It's harder to hire the best people into roles that don't sound senior - It's harder to make your existing team feel like they're growing.

That means your bucket is not only harder to fill with new people, but is leaking from all the folks looking for new titles elsewhere.

Time to add some hierarchy!


This is great. I've always found it really hard to remember what I did a month ago, let alone 5 months ago for my bi-annual (if that) perf review. Even worse as a manager. Building more of a habit around this stuff would be awesome. (BTW really recommend James Clear 'Atomic Habits'[0], found it really interesting.)

We're thinking about building something like this for people to track personal growth more easily at Progression [0]. Thinking nice pretty exports, benchmarking, all sorts of other stuff too.

Genuine request, if anyone does this regularly I'd love to speak to you.

[0] https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits [1] https://www.progressionapp.com/solo


Ooh boy, great to see this discussion. If anyone's interested, https://progression.fyi has a bunch more of these to compare and contrast (I'm adding Square's to it right now...)

As you'll see, lots of companies reinvent the wheel with this stuff. It feels fundamentally misaligned to me while these rubrics are solely owned by each employer – personally, I care about my growth across a career, not just a single job.

If this was measurable and transferrable in the same way as – say – learning a language (e.g, I can take my Go experience somewhere else) it would be far more compelling to me as an employee.

The question is: how many companies are willing to 'share' levels and expectations to facilitate this?


I definitely don't want some kind of career progression standard that is shared across companies.

Please work for the government if you crave this much structure.


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