 Hello, my name is Ted Stressenreuter. I'm the CTO at Secret Source and this is a brief overview of our professional ladder. The professional ladder helps you succeed by providing clear examples of what success looks like in different areas and at different levels. The professional ladder consists of sign posts that point the way on your professional journey. When you reach the top of the professional ladder you will be a true professional able to handle all kinds of situations with grace and style and ultimately enriching the lives of those around you and your customers in particular. The professional ladder is a series of behaviors divided into five areas and seven levels. The areas of the areas are ownership, communication, technical level, learning and leadership. Some people enter Secret Source at level nine and work their way up to level 13. Level nine represents recent graduates or people with some but little work experience. Level 13 represents experienced staff who are fully responsible for their work and excellent communicators. Level 13 also includes people who are excellent leaders and lifelong learners. We rarely contract people at level eight and level 14 is only partially defined at this time. You may notice that technical level is only one of the five areas we evaluate. This is because technical level absent of solid communication skills and ownership is almost worthless in our world. We work in teams and without strong communication and ownership progress is impaired. Strong communication and ownership are fundamental skills we encourage in all of our staff and a key feature in the success of the company. That said we do seek out the best candidates for every role and believe our technical interview process assures we find them. Let's have a look at each area and explore what it looks like at the different levels. At level nine, first of all ownership, at level nine staff demonstrate little responsibility for their work. They don't plan their tasks, they don't test their work and when things fail they can't explain why or what should be done to fix them. At level 10 often associated with the labeled junior they do plan their tasks and have a reasonable understanding of what success looks like for each task but rely on periodic supervision to make sure they don't get lost or too sidetracked. At level 12 and 11 and 12 we see staff taking on increasing amounts of responsibility. Some examples include writing solid automated tests asking for clarification when in doubt before starting to write code and providing input on others code via pair programming or code reviews. At level 13 and higher ownership can also include understanding our client's business goals and providing input and feedback on requested functionality when it does not appear to be in line with the goals of the budget or budget. At this level our staff feel deeply invested in our client's projects. Communication. Communication is the most difficult area to define in the latter because sometimes a single word or even silence is all the communication that's necessary to make a point. Good communication is high quality not quantity. Excellent communicators are excellent listeners and are able to hear the implications of what someone is saying in addition to the words they use. At level nine staff can write a bug report but may leave important details out. Commit messages may lack context or simply include unhelpful information like made the box prettier. Also at level nine staff may not be accustomed to talking about their feelings and leave out that type of communication when working with others. At level 10 we do see a slight increase in the quantity of communication in addition to the quality. Bug reports are more complete commit messages reflect the goals of the task more directly and there is more evidence of documentation for other members of the team. Levels 11 and up are represented by much more frequent and higher quality communication both oral and written and in a variety of media as well. Email, Slack, blog posts, presentations at user groups, et cetera. One very interesting trait that we expect to see starting at level 11 and increasing the staff move up the ladder is a willingness to give and receive constructive feedback and sometimes critical feedback because our only goal is to improve our performance. This type of communication requires deep psychological safety and as staff improve in their ability to communicate they also contribute to a psychologically safe environment and they encourage others to do the same. Technical level. During our interview process we assess a candidate's technical level. We have a separate document that provides rough classifications of the kinds of knowledge we find at different levels. One thing to note is that it is not uncommon for our staff to be at different technical levels in the different areas or even just different levels in the different areas. This is particularly true for technical level. It is not uncommon at all for staff to be at level 9 or 10 in communication and level 12 in technical level. This may be because in university and bootcamps and such they focus almost exclusively on the technical aspects. In our line of work, sorry, learning, in our line of work there is a never-ending stream of new and powerful technologies appearing on the horizon. Although best practices change far less frequently, being aware of these new technologies is a fundamental part of being a professional developer and it is thus essential that staff demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement, to continuously learning and being lifelong learners. This is not just limited to technical level, technical areas. This is about working in general. At level 9 staff are often unaware of the need to keep learning new things and don't employ powerful learning strategies. At level 10 staff will follow tech leaders, read a book from time to time, but not much more. At level 11 and up, staff engage in a variety of activities that promote learning. Things we like to see include conducting experiments to test hypotheses and publishing the results for others to see and contrast. At levels 12 and 13 it is not uncommon to see staff publishing their own content, blog posts, video tutorials, presentations, at conferences, etc. Recognizing your weaknesses and being able to change is the ultimate goal of being a lifelong learner. Leadership. This is the last slide. So much of what we do revolves around and requires knowledge transfer that it can be intimidating. Leadership is often consists of being the first to head in a direction that makes others uncomfortable, but which is ultimately for everyone's benefit, and then getting others to follow in that direction. At level 9 staff have little or no leadership experience or skills and are often limited to following due to fully others. At level 10, evidence of leadership includes helpful but not required documentation or demonstration of something. At this level, staff are building confidence in themselves and in their future followers. At level 1112 staff participate in organizing their teams, making decisions on who is responsible for what. It is at this level that our staff begin to make things happen without waiting for someone else to lead the charge. At level 13 and above staff are recognized as true leaders, in part by the number of followers they have and the demands placed on them from all areas of the organization. Part of our mission is to be recognized as authorities on the software development process. It seems almost ironic that four of the five areas are precisely not technical. So this concludes the presentation to our professional ladder, the introduction, and we encourage you to consult the actual professional ladder documentation that's available currently in our Google Drive. It may be available in other formats in the future, so be sure to ask around, find out. Thank you very much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this presentation.