Tech:Personal Development Policy

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Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to outline commitments made between volunteers and SRE Management in relation to personal development, development opportunities, and the potential for monetary investment.

The Role of Volunteers#

The role of a volunteer in their own personal development is crucial. A volunteer must want to develop and expand their knowledge or responsibilities to be supported in achieving this by SRE Management. A volunteer is responsible for:

• Ensuring they maintain up-to-date communications with their direct line manager, including partaking in the personal development review processes.
• Seeking opportunities that they are interested in, either internally to Miraheze or externally with other organisations.
• Supporting others in their development journey is possible – either through mentorship or skills testing.
• Engage with their direct line manager when there may be problems that will affect their ability to meet obligation with Miraheze volunteering, whether this is activity or personalised development plans.

The Role of SRE Management#

The role of the SRE Management team is to ensure volunteer wellbeing, ensure development is maintained and to ensure the effective operation of the SRE department. As such, the SRE Management team are collectively responsible for:

• Ensuring up-to-date communications are held with volunteers that they line manage.
• Reviewing opportunities that are presented internally or externally and ensuring that these are fairly distributed among their team.
• Ensuring volunteers are given ample opportunity to develop and meet their personal development plan objectives by redistributing work to meet this need.
• Ensuring personal development reviews are completed and maintained securely.
• Arranging meetings with volunteers who do not follow the personal development policy to understand their reasons for non-compliance.
• Ensuring sufficient development opportunities are given to volunteers, as well as sufficient mentorship if required.

Personal Development Cycle#

• Each volunteer will have a regular personal development review (PDR) meeting with their direct line manager. These should happen at least twice a year (every 6 months), but can be as frequent as agreed by the volunteer.
• Both the volunteer and manager should schedule a reasonable period of time to go through the PDR template summarised below.
• Once filled out, both will maintain a copy of the PDR, and it should form the basis of personal development until a new PDR is made.
• Once a PDR is due for renewal, objectives set in the previous review will be used to review progress to date.
• The process starts again.

Personal Development Review#

The PDR document can be found here.

Under ‘Progress Against Objectives’, there are 6 boxes. One is set as an SRE-wide objective, two are role-specific objectives (selected from below) and the remaining two are personal objectives set by the volunteer.

Community Engagement Specialists

• Bridge the gap between community and Site Reliability Engineering, engaging both sides to build a better project.
• Improve community-facing documentation for the Site Reliability Engineering department.

Data Engineers

• Promoting data quality in all teams, analysing discrepancies and passing this to the relevant team.
• Performing day-to-day work to ensure stability and availability is maintained in line with SLOs.

MediaWiki Engineers

• Triage and respond to incoming requests for support from users with the MediaWiki software.
• Performing day-to-day work to ensure stability and availability is maintained in line with SLOs.

Security Engineers

• Triaging and responding to user reports of potential security issues and conducting prompt/effective investigations.
• Managing security incidents as they occur and working with external teams to limit impact and do root cause analysis.

Site Reliability Engineers

• Performing day-to-day work to ensure stability and availability is maintained in line with SLOs.
• Managing incidents as they occur to reduce impact to users, and leading investigations into cause analysis.

Software Engineers

• Build and maintain software with a community-led focus.
• Building an ecosystem around software with a focus on continuous integration, performance, and security.

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