James Shore: A Software Engineering Career Ladder

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-27 22:00:07

I’ve been quiet lately, and that’s because I’ve joined OpenSesame as Vice President of Engineering. It’s been a fascinating opportunity to rebuild an engineering organization from the inside, and I’m loving every minute. We’re introducing a lot of cutting-edge software development practices, such as self-organizing vertically-scaled teams and Extreme Programming.

As you might expect, introducing these changes to an organization with [REDACTED] number of engineers has been challenging. (I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say how many engineers we have, so let’s just say “lots,” but not “tons.” Bigger than a breadbox, anyway. Enough that I don’t do any coding myself, and the managers that report to me don’t have time to do much either.)

What I’m really doing is changing the engineering culture at OpenSesame. Culture doesn’t change easily. It tends to snap back. True change involves changing hundreds of little day-to-day decisions. That’s hard, even when people want to make those changes, and full buy-in is hard to come by. I’ve hired several XP coaches to help, but even they’re stretched thin.