Career Frameworks for Engineers and Managers — with Francesco Dominidiato 🎙️

Today's guest is Francesco Dominidiato!

Francesco is CTO at Moneyfarm, one of the largest wealth management companies in Europe, and former CTO at high-growth startups like Casavo and Docebo.

During his career he has scaled organizations from zero to hundreds of employees, and has incredible experience at all levels: from leading small teams to NASDAQ-listed companies.

With Francesco, we talked about career frameworks, how to create a path that creates opportunities for both individual contributors and managers, how to address career development issues, organizational debt and more.

🎙️ Episode

You can watch the full episode on Youtube:

Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.

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🥇 Interview Summary

If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below.

It’s the 10-minute takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat.

Here is the agenda:

1. 🎯 Career Framework Evolution (02:54)

2. 🏗️ Building Effective Career Ladders (09:24)

3. 💰 Salary Ranges & Organizational Debt (30:31)

4. 📈 Framework Evolution & Assessment (41:15)

5. 👥 Engineering Leadership Roles (56:32)

Let's dive in 👇

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1) 🎯 Careers Frameworks Evolution (02:54)

Francesco shares his perspective on the evolution of engineering career frameworks. The industry went through distinct phases:

1. 🛠️ Craftsmanship Era — early days with minimal structure

2. ⚙️ Engineering Approach — more structured systems emerged

3. 🏭 Industrial Phase — what Francesco calls the "dark period" where companies tried to apply traditional industrial management to software

"Linda Hill says that leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving"

The industrial approach created several problems by forcing engineers into management roles to grow, leading to loss of technical expertise in teams, misaligned incentives for career growth, and reduced effectiveness in both technical and management roles.

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2) 🏗️ Building Effective Career Ladders (09:24)