The Full Spectrum Software Engineer
An expansive view of what a software engineer can be
Full Spectrum Engineering is our term for how we view the Software Engineering role at Highlight. It is an expansive vision for how engineers can take on their role and their skill development. We use Full Spectrum Engineering to define expectations and provide a roadmap for growth and opportunities.
We arrive at this wide-ranging view of software engineering based on the following values:
- It’s all about our users and business outcomes.
- We want empowered product engineers who have a deep sense of ownership through the full development life cycle.
- To drive quick feedback loops and prevent bottlenecks, we not only want as few handoffs between teams as possible, we want to be able to allow engineers to pick up nearly any task.
If you care deeply about the outcomes the team is driving towards and choose to own as much.of the work as possible, it follows that you take on more skills and do more kinds of work to make it all happen. Full Spectrum Engineering helps shape that skill development.
The Full Spectrum
Each bar on the spectrum represents a major aspect of the work required to get great solutions in the hands of customers.
Here is a summary of each part:
- Business — You learn about what success means for your business and you orient your work towards it.
- Customer — You figure out what your customers are all about — what motivates them, frustrates them, the jobs they are getting done. You sit in on user interviews, you internalize the viewpoint of the customer.
- Product — You know the product vision and strategy — you shape your tech decisions towards them. You engage early in Product Opportunities, bringing your viewpoint as an expert in the practical aspects of bringing product value to production.
- Security — You have the skills to make secure systems. You harden systems and make choices with security in mind.
- DevOps and Infrastructure — You pick, develop, and run your infrastructure — you can alter the CI/CD pipeline — you partner with specialists to make dev cycles small and fast.
- Quality — It’s everyone’s job at every stage of the SDLC. You obsess over quality and ensure that even if we go fast we get it correct, too.
- Architecture and Design — You learn new patterns and best practices, and you apply them practically. You strive for systems that match user needs, that grow over time in flexible ways.
- Site Reliability — You build observable, resilient systems. You create monitors, alerts, and runbooks to help you and others understand system health. You contribute to a great Incident Response capability.
We don’t expect people to be experts at all aspects of the Spectrum, but to be open to learning and creating impact, over time, in each part. Obviously people will have strengths and interests and we encourage both breadth and depth.
We still have experts in these areas, including Quality Engineers and DevOps Engineers. These specialized roles look more like teachers, advocates, and tool builders in our model.
Growing software engineering impact using the Spectrum
Our Software Engineering Ladders describe the levels of skills and impact that we want to see for engineers at each of our career levels. Software engineers can self-evaluate and engineering managers use the tool in our bi-annual Impact Reviews.
Engineering Managers then work with software engineers to create Individualized Growth Plans to increase their skills and impact in the parts of the spectrum that make the most sense for their personal and team situations. If this sounds like a heavy process, it’s not. For the most part this just adds useful structure to something you are probably already doing- trying to grow software engineers in a way that fits your business.
Does this sound like something that would work for your company? Let me know what you think!
