The Case Against Public Levels

In Dragon Ball Z, the Saiyans wear a scouter, a little eyepiece that reads someone’s power level and puts a number on it. Vegeta lives by that number. He sizes up every opponent by what the scouter tells him, and his whole sense of himself is wrapped up in pushing his own reading higher than everyone else’s. The number stops being a description of the fighter and becomes the thing he obsesses over.Public engineering levels are like that scouter.When I joined Pocus I was unsure about a lot of things, but certain about a few. One of them was to delay public levels as long as I possibly could. Some people found it odd. Most startups get this backwards. Seed and Series A companies, twenty or thirty engineers in, stand up a public ladder almost out of the gate. It’s wrong for the stage, and wrong in a way that’s hard to walk back.LevelsI think of levels as an abstraction over what an engineer actually does. You take the work, and the work you wish they were doing, and spread it across a…