That bubble is not the world, I exist outside the ladder and I am legion.
Hence the author's "In the software engineering world".
Nothing in author's write-up led me to think he doesn't understand that.
Maybe someone could update it?
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
“Nobody drives there anymore. There’s too much traffic.”
These companies can do 13 interviews because people will put up with them.
The little place I work does phone screen, work sample, final interview, reference check. We can be done in a week. Nobody wants to work with me bad enough to sit through 13 interviews.
If you're such a rockstar you can probably get shortened loops in good companies through referrals
Police is a protected title but anyone can be a thought police. One can be a spin doctor without any academic acumen. Notice how when qualified, the words take on a broader and sometimes illustrative meaning than when used in isolation. Context matters.
You’ll be happy to hear that anyone can call themselves an engineer, even in Oregon, as a Federal Court correctly decided in a first amendment case brought by Mats Järlström.
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
You’re welcome.
In what insane world does this make any amount of sense?
I'm sure OP is correct that this is a signal for a bad org - but from the outside looking in you'll do anything.
I recognize this guy seems to only be dealing with FAANG type companies, but the disconnect from my own reality is so vast it’s hard to reconcile.
I have never worked anywhere with the L4/L5/whatever crap. No one I have worked with has either. It sounds downright dystopian that people are reduced to a basically a number (if you leave out the L).
I am assuming he left the job this year? If so, more disconnect. I am working but looking, and this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible. This guy went on a zillion in person interviews? Is he maybe talking about the distant past of two years ago?
The NDA minefield? Maybe I am naive or sheltered, but it’s never came up in interviews and was not something I ever sweated. For the simple reason that there is no secret sauce so magic that I could tell someone in ten minutes in an interview and spill all the beans. But what do I know, maybe YouTube has some secret variable this dude invented I am just too dumb to understand.
I could go on. But the entitlement coming off of this post as I stress about paying bills and keeping my kids in school and fed as I read this on Xmas eve is a lot to take.
Am I that much of an outlier that I need to get with the program? Or is this as out of touch with the current reality as I feel?
No! You’re right where you need to be (just not where you want). Many of us have had a ridiculously difficult year.
You’re not alone.
Now, your compensation is based entirely on your level, which obviously makes it matter a great deal, but my experience hasn't been that there are mind games around it.
My advice: Don't apply on platforms that are filled with spam. I think the best choice I've made for work is posting on Hacker News that I'm looking for work rather than bothering with job sites like LinkedIn. Both times I've done this, this last time even after being laid off, I had a new position within the month. I've never even gotten replies on any other platform: not on LinkedIn, not on Indeed, not on Upwork... but commenting on Hacker News has gotten me a job in relatively short order, every time.
My personal hypothesis is that employers look here to find interesting people... or at least that's how I'd go about it. Both companies I've joined from HN have been filled with obviously autistic people.
This inevitably happens in any large organization. People just have positions like "Department Head" or "Chief Something-Something" instead of numbers.
If anything, engineering/research organizations are unusual because in "traditional" organizations your growth is basically linked to the number of people you direct. In technical orgs, you can be an individual contributor and be at a higher level than many managers.
I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.
I will never understand people who refuse to work at a big company yet complain about money of all things. For reference my last job at Google paid $450k+. It seems like it would behoove you to enter the other world.
Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase. Nobody will care or remember what you did or what level you were given enough timespan. Take the bits that you want (money, skills etc) to live life, but don't get too caught up trying to win the game.
That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.
At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.
You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.
Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.
Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.
Ugh. Pain. I'm hiring, and I've been filtering out resumes that are heavy on these kinds of metrics.
Because I literally get thousands of entries with these kinds of wording. Often with excessively precise numbers, like "by 23.5%".
My problem is that it's hard to tell the amount of real work it took to do that. It might have been as stupid as creating an additional index in the database, or it might have involved a deep refactoring across multiple systems with a zero-downtime gradual rollout.
I would prefer something like: "I worked as the hands-on leading developer to do a large-scale refactor on the highly loaded front-end network routing system, resulting in user-visible latency decrease on the Youtube front page".
For me the key words are: "hands-on" (and not just writing a product brief and getting resources for it), "large-scale refactor" (so likely not just creating an additional database index), "highly loaded".
I wonder what it was that the amazing managers taught him. I've never had an experience with managers that would leave such an impression on me. Fellow developers, sure; but not managers.
Promotion at Google, as in many places, is tough. Status is allocated partially on level, so it sucks to not see that growth.
Sometimes lack of promotion can be not having the right opportunities.
It's fair to leave a company for whatever reason.
For any other L4->L5s, or anyone wanting to become a senior engineer, it's worth self reflecting on whether there's improvement that can be made from failed promotion attempts.
> people all across the org knew me and said I was indispensable to the company and were surprised that I wasn't already at an L5/6 level.
No one in a large org is indispensable, but many are very valuable. Many L4s are very valuable, but at doing L4 work. It's not a value judgement.
L4->L5 is a step of responsibility: can you be trusted to handle a multi quarter project, without much supervision.
> I helped launch/lead features on YouTube, I led teams, I designed and implemented systems that were still in use to that day by many people
The details aren't clear here, but sometimes an engineer can be leading projects, and need supervision: poor delivery, poor communication, poor outcomes.
"Too little impact" in this context can mean "you needed too much supervision" or "too little impact per $TIME_PERIOD" meaning you can have delivered great technical solutions, but not at the rate or level of independence needed to meet the mark.
Again, not meeting this mark isn't a value statement. It's a different type of work, but it happens to be incentivized with more $$$.
If the team is already full of lvl5's/6's, there's not going to be enough senior eng work for a new one, particularly when headcount is being reduced.
I wonder if the author had attempted to transfer to a different part of the company first, since a different organization might have more room to grow. It might not be possible to do a transfer plus a promotion simultaneously, but it's likely a less stressful option than leaving the company.
>This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can't tell your team, "I can't take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming." You just have to work faster.
Guess what promo will get you? More context switching. Maybe that’s a thing to work on.
If you're that passionate focus the excess energy into your own projects, technical or otherwise. But don't give your life to a corporation that couldn't give less of a shit about you.
And this is also why you should be applying and interviewing along the way. Always keep your options open. The corporation is only looking out for itself, you need to be doing the same.
the most important job, that has ever existed, and that will ever exist, is politics. moving up the career ladder you have to start thinking in terms of people, or maybe even in terms of mammals and mammalian group dynamics, cos thats who youre "programming" now, not computers. and most programmers aren't cut out for that, just as most regular people aren't cut out for programming. its hard to say why, but thats the on-the-ground data i see again and again.
i also would like to push back on the "personal projects" mindset - the sentiment often being "just live in your own little world" (not saying it is here, but this is what it often implies.) if youre going to admit defeat and retreat, be honest about what youre doing. dont dress it up as a 'win'. ceding financial/social/political agency is never a victory, but sometimes a neccesity. quitting a mag7 like google is objectively a step down whichever way you slice it. you can count on two hands the number of companies that have the level of resouces that google does - it might be worth to swallow ones pride and slog it out.
Yes, the reward for more work is always more work. Hard work is the best way to make yourself unseen. Those who get promoted are busy advertising themselves, befriending strategically and may even take credit of your work while you are busy sweating.
>My final conversation with my manager was heart-wrenching. I had prepared a script, anticipating a counter-offer or a guilt trip. Instead, I was met with soft and understanding empathy.
Too much naivety out there to mention empathy even in a startup, let alone when working for a shark as Youtube. That was rather a good news for your manager: no counter offer, but also the fact they never rewarded you internally (L5/6) was a way to push you to leave.
1. Is it normal for someone who graduated in 2018 tell “with over 13 years” of experience?
2. He quit Google but not got hired anywhere else?
Personal anecdata: I was solo building software projects in highschool that earned income (real product, creating real value, some of which were acquired) and worked on the school district websites. During college I contracted with startups part time while also building projects of my own.
brcmthrowaway•2h ago
Expect a mailing list subscription with courses coming soon