Coalesce Support Agent and Engineer Roles
What does this merge request do?
This coalesces Agent and Engineer roles into a single-stream career track.
Why are we doing this?
- The technical level of the current Agent position isn't sufficient for our future needs.
- Having a single-stream career track makes more sense as we increase specialization in different product areas.
- GitLab.com isn't a role - organizing as one team is more efficient as it allows us to redirect individuals to problem areas by problem type, rather than being restricted by an artificial division.
How does it work?
- Agents will be relevelled according to the new criteria; transitioning to Support Engineer at different Compa levels based on their current level.
What will this look like in the future?
This builds 2 dimensions for career progression: Level and Focus.
Level
Level is the vertical progression that represents the shift in focus from individual contributions towards team level enablement:
graph LR
A[Support Engineer] --> B[Senior Support Engineer]--> C[Staff Support Engineer]Focus
Focus defines the area of concentration that an Engineer will develop their skills in. In this iteration, there are two profiles that cover the main personas of our customers. In the future, there will be further differentiation in focus areas.
graph TD
subgraph "Support Engineer"
B["Solutions Support"]
C["Application Support"]
D["Future Focus C"]
E["Future Focus D"]
endSolutions Support
The Solutions Support focus is driven by the needs of the GitLab Administrator. Back-end performance issues and difficulties that a typical administrator would be concerned with drive the learning areas of this focus.
Application Support
The Application Support focus is driven by the needs of the GitLab end-user. Things like CI tuning, API usage and integrations with 3rd party tools like Kubernetes that dominate the mind of developers and other end-users would drive the learning areas of this focus.
Relates to: gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta#1608 (closed)