Presentation: How To: Developers' Community Driven Career Growth

The talk is based on my own experience about a new approach of how do we teach people, how do we educate our people. Here at booking.com we have a different career process. The typical career pathway for a developer would be to become a senior developer or to become a team leader. And there is a problem for our senior developers for example, because that's a role with clearly defined expectations, what senior developers should be. However, there is not much clarity about how to become a senior developer, what you need to do to become one. There is a description of how the process about promoting somebody to senior happens, with nominations and promotion committees. However, there is no guidance on what exactly do you do to become a senior developer. And that's because the senior role is not only about skills you have or not about knowledge you have. It's more about behavior demonstrated. It's basically about 'Do you care about your products, do you care about other people around you? Do you own systems? Do you teach others?'

We created a group of people, we picked up a magic number of 15 people in the group, all of them are developers, and we put them in the online group. We use Facebook at Work. We created the group, you can think about as a normal Facebook group. We put those people there and throughout two weeks we were posting one assignment per day. It were same assignments for everybody, different assignment every day, and then we asked those people to complete those assignments by creating a separate post with their findings, results, outcome.

The second type of assignments we had was about self-reflection. The very first question we asked was: read about the expectations of a senior developer role and try to think where do you match, where you do not match and what you can do to actually get there. Having that kind of assessments help people to self-reflect and see what is their reality right now and what they can do about it. So the whole idea was, if we provide this training spread across two weeks we were hoping that we can create the right momentum, we can create a habit of doing unusual things on top of their usual work. It wasn't a classroom, we didn't ask them to come at a certain time in the room. We were posting those assignments online in the morning and then people could work on them at their own pace. That created a habit for people to do things outside of their immediate responsibilities, doing something which senior developers at booking.com can do, developing this momentum to make those things happen even after the training ends.

It could be everyone. Though, I think it will be mostly beneficial for seniors and leads because they have people to grow. At the same time, it can be also beneficial for those who are in the development position and would like to grow because by this they might think that self-reflection is important and that they don’t need to wait for someone to come and help them grow, they can make it themselves.