Dwarves
Memo
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  • Created: Sep 21, 2019
  • Author: han
  • Tags: careersoftware engineeremployee
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  • Folder: handbook
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Making a Career

The average tenure of employees working at many technology companies today is shockingly low. At both Amazon, Google and other companies, it’s just around one year. At Dwarves Foundation, it’s just around three years as of late 2018. That’s something to be proud of, and something to ensure endures. When you work at Dwarves Foundation, it should be feasible to think about this as the place for making a life-long career.

Mastery & Titles

Advancing your career at Dwarves Foundation doesn’t mean giving up on your craft and moving into “management.” Whether you work in programming, design, ops, support, or whatever, you can become better at the work itself and level-up that way. This is especially important since we’re a relatively small company with just two layers of managerial cake: executives and team heads. And both the executives and heads still spend the majority of their time doing actual work themselves as well.

We’ve mapped our trajectory of mastery to six different levels. That title structure is shared amongst all departments, but the particulars of what characterizes one level from another will, of course, be different. Here’s an example of the titles for programming:

While this is how we recognize mastery, it’s by no means an expectation that everyone will start as a junior and end up as a principal. We need people and perspectives from all levels of skill. Also, for those who do end up progressing all the way through this path, it may well be a journey of many, many years, if not a decade+.

However, these titles make it clear to everyone where someone is in their career progression at Dwarves Foundation. Note that these titles are about a particular role at Dwarves Foundation. Someone may well have been a “Senior Designer” somewhere else with different assessment criteria and a different workflow, and then still start at Dwarves Foundation as a “Designer.” We recognize mastery and titles at Dwarves Foundation for the work done at Dwarves Foundation.

Day to day, though, these titles aren’t much of a factor. However, they do give newcomers another way of orienting themselves at the company, and it gives everyone a clear idea of tracking their career progression.

You can see the specific titles and proficiencies expected for: Programmers, Designers, Business.

Salary & Promotion

You get the paycheck on the 1st or the 15th of the month depend on your joined day.

Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same at Dwarves Foundation. When someone gets a promotion, that goes from one level to the next, they’ll get a corresponding pay raise Mar 1st as well.

The payroll fund is always reversed at 50% of total revenue. We always try to pays at the top 20% for our industry salary levels. The comparison data is provided by market research company, e.g., Adecco in Vietnam, that polls compensation data from all the major companies in our industry and plenty of our smaller peers as well.

The data is reviewed once per year at the end of January. If it’s warranted, that is if the market rates have gone up, we’ll increase pay on Mar 1st to follow suit. We don’t decrease payment, even if the market rates may have dropped. If that happens, we’ll hold them steady until they come up again.

Payroll is run by An, and Han does the transfer. If you’ve got a query on your salary, you can talk to An.

Performance Review

We perform bi-yearly reviews in July and January. Everyone who has been with the company at least 90 days and completed the training courses gets a review. The primary purpose of these reviews is to give feedback on career path advancement and recognize accomplishments. We wrap up our January reviews in time to make promotion related pay adjustments effective Feb 1st. We follow a simple process:

The head of your team will reach out to you when it’s time for you to write up your review. Of course, you can (and should) ask for feedback as often as you’d like it. The Performance Indicator is usually the summary of Responsible, Teamwork and Mastery