About

Develop Me is a collection of guidelines and processes - a framework if you will - that aims to help grow our Developers and Development capabilities at Trade Me.

The goal is to provide a useful resource to all those looking to advance their Development skills, or foster advancement in someone else. The primary audience of this is Developers and their managers, however much of this should still be relevant to those in other roles looking to try their hand at Development.

Ultimately this is the framework we are creating to help Developers and their managers:

• understand the desired skill sets for Trade Me Developers
• assess existing capability and identify growth opportunities
• discover training and learning opportunities and resources

Purpose

In the past we’ve tried to measure Developer competency using Junior / Intermediate / Senior levels in combination with (and also sometimes without) skills matrices. The theory was that we could easily identify, and measure, the necessary technical skills required for different levels. The reality was somewhat different:

• It was difficult to express broad progression - it was hard to effectively, and unambiguously, model a steady progression in core skills. For example we would have skill requirements like ‘a Junior Developer has good working knowledge of C#’, and ‘an Intermediate Developer has excellent working knowledge of C#’. In practical terms there is no dividing line between the two requirements, and this makes consistent and meaningful measurements impossible.
• There were too many ifs and buts - there are a tonne of differing and varying skills within Development at Trade Me, and every Developer has a unique combination of these. This again blurred lines between the levels as we could have ‘Senior’ Developers that lacked certain specific skills, but made up for it in other areas. Measurement was again subjective, and consistency took a jump out the window as different groups prized different skills above others.
• Such an approach implicitly values status over mastery - in other words, the outcome of this approach is seen less as the advancement in skill or expertise in any number of practices or disciplines, and more as the achievement of a certain rank. This distracts from the central purpose of such a framework which is inherently to help create better Developers.

Growth Focused Model

To overcome these issues Develop Me looks to replace the old seniority based model and instead drive focus towards mastery and growth:

• Developers will no longer be measured as Junior / Intermediate / Senior, they will simply be Developers
• Growth will be geared towards advancing existing skills, or acquiring new skills, rather than attaining the next level-up