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.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
But they don’t.
I’ve seen enough people glossed over repeatedly and then when enough people leave and the org is in a less leveraged position, then the promos are no longer an issue. Such BS.
Giving out promotions when people are already working at the level they'd be promoted to is simply a waste of money.
This is the author's biggest mistake. If you voluntarily work on tasks above your pay grade you are signaling to the company that you don't need a promotion.
The problem the OP faced is that YouTube is optimizing under a short time frame and under the belief that employees are fungible. The latter being a common problem with big orgs, thinking there is no value to institutional knowledge. Yet in reality that is often extremely important
Source: got paid 180k and took 2 years off.
Even at Netflix who is famous for "all cash, no stock, almost never bonuses": https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...
Biggest jump is 400K and that's at L7, for Principal SE, the top level. Below that each level is about a $100-150K jump. Nothing to complain about, to be clear.
> If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart.
Even if you believe they are operating at a very high level of efficiency it is a naïve assumption to make. False positives and false negatives are things that exist in every non-perfect evaluation system.
But you are working backwards
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Promotion decisions are made by committees which are 1-2 levels above your manager, your manager presents the candidates. They round up a pot of multiple teams which are discussed at once and there are usually hard quotas (like 5%) of promotions to give out to this pot of employees. These hard quotas make it impossible to "do the right thing" because even if a lot of people deserve the promotion, only x% can get it. The composition of the pot of people can easily cause the problem which is described in the blog post, for example if you have a high number of juniors or a high number of employees who joined at the same time or employees with incorrect levelling from the start. If 20%+ deserve a promotion then it simply turns into a game of luck.
As a manager you try as hard as possible to get these promotions but the system of these big companies is just too rigid. Its like a pit fight instead of objectively looking at output. I have seen a lot of people leave for the same reason but I haven't seen a single change to the system in 5+ years.
Next we could talk about layoff mechanics, its equally disturbing.
In all of those jobs, I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.
At the jobs where I was responsible for strategy, one of my conditions for employment was I would be reporting directly to a director or CTO.
They are doing exactly what they are paid to, which is communicate decisions made above them to the people doing the work.
You are correct - that is a powerless position. That's by design. Work isn't a democracy.
You missed promo 3 times, and when you left he didn't try to counter you. Is it possible s/he might have been blocking you?
Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.
The mouse wheel this guy has been running in, both working for YouTube and preparing for interviews to work elsewhere, just sounds like an intentionally created psychology-breaking torture machine designed to eat youthful enthusiasm and ambition and spit out the dried up shell once the juice has dwindled to an arbitrary low yield.
Jumping from one broken hierarchy to another seemed to be the (misguided) goal.
The above might be a bit harsh, my opinion hardened and my empathy evaporated somewhat reading this line "prioritize user retention metrics"
We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense.
Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazing rituals.
You'd be amazed just how much you can learn about someone's actual skills and experience (or lack thereof) through long-form discussion. I think we don't truly talk enough in our currently broken interview process.
My current job was also behavioral where I am a staff architect at a 3rd party company and it does require coding. As an interviewer, I also only do behavioral interviews. But let’s be realistic, it doesn’t take much to be a competent enterprise dev or even an enterprise architect.
The type of hard problems that BigTech has to solve is completely different. While I would never have trusted any developer I ever met at AWS within 100 feet of a customer, they also shouldn’t let me within 100 feet of the code that runs any of the AWS services.
Even at my medium size consulting company we have a 0.4% application/offer rate. Can you imagine what it is at BigTech? How do you filter just by talking to someone?
I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.
> I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.
You should definitely have a coding task when hiring programmers but it doesn't have to be very big or difficult.
To not play this made-up game, you either decide to stop caring about compensation, or be your own boss. Of course these are not always realistic depending on one’s life situation.
First, searching for videos sucks. Yes, the first few results can be useful, then more and more crap shows up. This just wastes my time. But, more importantly - more and more AI videos means I am being bombarded with more time wasters. I have about zero interest in AI videos; I am not saying 100% of it is crap, but I am getting more and more tired wasting any time in this regard here. Then the addiction by Google to have us watch ads - they killed ublock origin too on chrome. Even aside from this, I am noticing a drop of quality lately; many of the channels seem much more boring. I guess this kind of fatigue kicks in over time in general, but it seems to me as if some youtube "content creators" are running out of real ideas. They seem to be desperately addicted to "get the likes" and "get subscribers". I stopped being logged in to youtube years ago already and I also, oddly enough, want to completely decouple myself from Google too (too much Evil in this company now) - youtube is unfortunately something I still need and use right now, but many things suck more and more. Also that "swipe shorts down" - that activity is IMO a mental problem. After some 30 swipe downs, I ask myself why I am doing this. Google tries to want to commit me to this swipe action. It is like psychological manipulation. Click click drag drag click click click.
:disappointed face:
That's always the solution when the problem is enshittification. Pay a little extra for what you remember it used to be like.
For only $2 more you can get the large fries and coke, but for $5 more you get the jumbo!
Enshittification is when a middleman platform locks in buyers and then locks in sellers. It's not when things cost money. YouTube has enshittification, but the enshittification isn't merely the fact that it costs money. In fact, any non-shit platform for anything would probably (either be run as a hobby or) cost money to use since it wouldn't fund itself by stealing from you.
I would never use YouTube in incognito mode or logged out... it's positively garish and loud with garbage.
This has to mean that the "level" does not, in fact, "dictate the scope of problems one is allowed to solve", but only the money part.
It's certainly legitimate to want more money, esp. when you think you deserve it compared to others. But it's a little weird the article spends so much time trying to explain they want a more senior position for other reasons after having said they're already tasked with solving senior problems.
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 had a lote of doubt about my own ability because I never got promoted. Was I not doing enough, am I not making impact. But you should never measure yourself by this. I left for more opportunities and more impact. I actually only knew my own value after rounds of external interviewing
This just makes me feel that the system being described is exploitative. It's dependent upon people not knowing their value.
I'm glad you got out and were able to better define the value you can provide.
Having said that, please don't work on "prioritize user retention metrics" ever again.
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.
The simplest explanation of these datapoints is simply that this person is not operating at the staff level in a way that is fairly obvious to others, yet hard to articulate in a way that this person can emotionally receive and accept.
None of this means they aren’t or can’t be a highly valuable and skilled engineer. Higher levels are more about capacity for high-level responsibility and accountability in a way that makes executives feel comfortable and at ease. “Not enough impact” means that even if this person is involved in high-impact projects, executives do not ascribe the results or responsibility for those results entirely to them.
While this is painful, it is not a bad thing, and it is not a disfavor. People who aren’t ready for great responsibility often underestimate the size of the gap. Watching a talented engineer get eaten alive because they were given executive-adjacent accountability that they weren’t ready for is not fun for anybody. Anyone who has operated in true staff+ or director+ roles at huge companies here knows just how brutal the step up in expectations is. It is far from trivial, and it simply isn’t for everyone.
It's also a horrible swe job market out there. Haha
But the biggest is to never feel like it's a disfavor. You are worth it and there is always room to grow, I just didn't know how else to grow at the company anymore
You can't take denied promos at face value, honestly.
This was my experience as well.
Maybe your manager didn't push hard enough for you at the level calibration meeting. Maybe your director didn't like the project you were on as much as the one another manager's engineers worked on, so they weren't inclined to listen to your manager push for you. Maybe the leadership team decided to hire a new ML/AI team this fiscal year, so they told the rest of the engineering org that they only have the budget for half as many promos as the year before.
And these are the things I've heard about on the _low_ end of the spectrum of corporate/political bullshit.
There is an argument to be made that playing the game is part of the job. Perhaps, but you still get to decide to what degree you want to play at any given company, and are allowed to leave and get a different set of rules. And even so, there will always be a lot of elements that are completely outside of your control.
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.
Probably would've been less stressful. Lol.
maybe it's the new HN account or something?
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.
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.
It’s certainly not apples to apples with any other random tech job to where you can just compare TC while ignoring level of stress. And the money is good but not life changing good.
Most software engineers are not status-seekers, and are not driven by prestige or a big paycheck.
Big tech companies attract the same type of software developers that investment banks do to finance majors, or MBB management consulting firms do to business majors.
Of course, I'm not saying that those are the people that FAANG-companies get exclusively, far from, but you have to...immerse yourself, and drink some kool aid, before you enter that rat race.
Most people will look at leetcode marathons, infinite interview rounds, relocation, etc. and think "absolutely not".
Of course some people are just really sharp, and can almost stumble into these jobs, but most will have to put some real effort into it, and jump through the flaming hoops.
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.
Getting through the interview process used to be so easy back then. I probably applied to 2-3 jobs to get an offer. That has changed drastically since 2023.
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.
The article was interesting and much of it rang true, but not this detail.
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.
It's ok. I am in Zurich and an L5 Google employee gets a ton of money so I am happy anyway. I decided that the personal sacrifice to get to L6 is not worth it and I am happy to cruise along for as long as they let me
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.
The comment about working in your own projects was to say that if you are so passionate you want to keep working behind what you need to put in to your job, work on something important to you.
Great comment. I'm having some trouble correctly slicing the "step down" on the front page of HN where some ex-Googlers sold their biz for $20B. Can you help with your objective eye?
Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?
In the end it doesn't matter, you'll make more money by either leaving or getting a retention offer.
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.
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.
They have both the time and experience to help mentor.
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".
But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!
> social trust
But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.
I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.
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.
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.
> it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy
The one place where I experienced a lot of rounds of interviews (at least 8 interviews, I think) was at the Wikimedia Foundation. It's an organization that is very explicitly built on consensus-based decision making. There were many great things about working there and at first it was very different from typical corporate culture. In some ways it was stifling, at least for someone who isn't a savvy politician. By the time I left in 2021, they had fully adopted the same kind of leveling system as discussed here, with all of the same political and structural constraints on advancement.
I bet this AI slop image is actually leaning more towards photos of a counselor at a hospital or clinic.
Because it has several things that not only don't make sense for the prompted situation, but also suggest terrible HR for a company big enough to have ID lanyards.
A generic corporate stock photo would have a better chance of being appropriate.
I acknowledge that the author (probably) had indeed experienced the things described (at least most of them, as LLMs often like to add details here and there), and it was fine in terms of being interesting, but I feel offended when people try to pass of text formulated by an LLM (even if they put in a bulletpoint draft) without disclosure that it's been written by an LLM.
Can the author please share the prompt containing the draft that he sent to the LLM?
I'd much rather read that!
Maybe someone could update it?
Wow. 5 already feels like too many to me. 3 would be closer to ideal, counting the initial screening. 8 is positively too many; 13 is hellish.
It's very depressing when we start accepting 5 as the new normal.
“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
Expect a mailing list subscription with courses coming soon
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
>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.