Your First 90 Days

Congratulations! You’re part of the team!

In your first 90 days, you’ll be getting aligned with your manager on approach and expectations. You’ll get up and running, do real work, in real circumstances, with real coworkers, for long periods of time. It’s your manager’s responsibility to give you proper opportunities to demonstrate your skills and fit for the job. This includes your technical expertise, your engagement with coworkers, and your ability to take feedback and adapt to the Minnek's culture. Similarly, it’s on you to take advantage of those opportunities, and to show that you’re capable of meeting the team standards.

When you start, you’ll receive an outline of expected performance metrics for your first 3 months. Those standards will be clear and attainable, and your manager will give you frequent, candid feedback. On occasion, despite our collective best efforts, it’s not a fit. We don’t do full-scale performance improvement plans during the first three months. So if during that time it starts looking like your long-term employment won’t work out, your manager will let you know early and why.

We hope, and fully expect, that your first 90 days will confirm what we learned in the hiring phase — you’re well suited for this job, this team, and you’re invigorated by the work to be done. Just put in your best effort, make sure you reach out if things aren’t feeling right, embrace the feedback you get from your manager, and openly share your feedback with them!

Mastery & Seniority Titles

Advancing your career at Minnek doesn’t mean giving up on your craft. No matter your role, 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 few layers of managerial cake.

Within each of our job functions, we’ve mapped our trajectory of mastery to four different levels. That title structure is shared amongst to the Engineering for the moment, but the particulars of what characterizes one level from another will of course be different. Here’s an example of the titles for the engineers:

• Junior Software Engineer (SE1)
• Mid Software Engineer (SE2)
• Senior Software Engineer (SE3)
• Lead Software Engineer (SE4)

While this is how we recognize mastery, it’s by no means an expectation that everyone will start as a SE1 and end up as a SE4. Minnek needs people and perspectives from all levels of skill. And 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+.

But these titles make it clear to everyone where someone is in their career progression at Minnek. Note that these titles are about a particular role at Minnek. Someone may well have been a “Senior Software Engineer” somewhere else with a different assessment criteria and a different workflow, and then still start at Minnek as a “SE1”. We recognize mastery and titles at Minnek for the work done at Minnek.

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

See the Engineers Levels Summary

Promotions

Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same at Minnek.

When you get a promotion, that is you move from one level to another, you’ll get a corresponding pay raise effective on your next pay cycle.

Performance Reviews

You’ll meet with your manager for formal performance reviews. When you’re new to Minnek, you’ll meet at the 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year marks. Then you’ll meet once a year, around your anniversary with the company. Your manager will share performance expectations for your role when you start, and they’ll keep you apprised of any changes to expectations should they evolve.

Managers are expected to document performance review outcomes and any action items or deadlines that come out of the meetings.

Performance Improvement Plans

If your work performance is not meeting expectations, you may be put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). We only initiate PIPs if your manager’s concern is correctable in the short term. We do not initiate PIPs for fundamental performance issues that relate to your core job skills. If you’re a Programmer whose coding skills are not at the level they need to be, we’d forego a PIP. However we may initiate a PIP to help you improve your performance in a coachable skill like project management. In those cases, we’ll follow our performance plan process.