> In the software engineering world, we exist on a ladder. We call this ”Leveling”.
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.
In my 25 years in tech, there were no meritocracies. I came from a simple working class upbringing and experienced upward mobility into the white collar class.
I differentiated myself by always finding ways to solve problems, that others weren’t willing to do. People expected things to be done a certain way, I expected nothing and did everything myself my own way.
I never had mentorship that taught me “how to play the game”. People saw me as a threat, some would copy my work and take credit for it. I don’t have the mentality to fight with people over a game, so I let people win, to my detriment.
I never had hunger for title or compensation, so it was never offered to me unless I voiced my desire to exit.
My friends who played the game are sitting on a fortune, where they have more material possessions, but their kids are struggling and they are struggling, to find peace and happiness, because they are “owned” by the game. They have no substance in their life and compare themselves to others who play the game. A endless cycle of jealously.
I sit here with peace and very high life satisfaction, understanding I have skills that help people, that fulfill a purpose, that comes with healthy integration with my unbreakable values.
Learning to think independently while ignoring superficial reward signals with focus on self concordant goals is the recipe to life satisfaction.
+1. Worth saying this is also not at all a software engineering thing, it’s a large organization thing. I found I could easily discuss career leveling with non-technical government employees. In fact they have much more context than my friends in software engineering that never worked for large companies.
Except for the money - the entire reason most people work everyday…
I’m 51, worked at two F10 at the time companies out of my ten jobs and hated them both - GE and 8 years later Amazon. I purposefully made the choice of pursuing a smaller company and ignoring constant outreach from Google (GCP consulting division). But let’s not dismiss the close to $100K diference I could be making than what I make now.
Also a 25 year old SA that I mentored at AWS three years ago is making the same as I am making. They are an L5 (mid level) and I am a staff consultant. They are pre-sales (no commission) and I am implementations.
I went from, if not scraping by, never really recovered from dot-bomb to a pretty good job at a medium-size public company latterly. It was "mostly" good. But the difference in money set me up in a way that I previously really wasn't (even if not top tech levels).
The worst part about this is that the level is largely made up. Its a social construct.
for example a "senior engineer" at a FAANG has more "value" than lead engineer at a no-name startup.
However the skill gap between a lead engineer of a team of 6 vs a "senior engineer" at FAANG is massive.
a "Senior Engineer" (ie [e|l]5/6 at a faang) makes almost no product decisions. There is a team that makes the GUI, product, marketing, infra, and then a bunch of sub teams that look after the specific part that you are currently dealing with.
Your startup person has to make all those decisions them selves and communicate/delegate it
Being an 6/7 feels like being a teenager with a coddling parent by comparison.
But! the point is this, that name, is all just an illusion. There are plenty of E6s at FAANG that are mediocre, there are plenty of E3s that are leaders.
You must make your own worth. Sure you might be working at a no-name company, but that doesn't mean you can't be _good_. The thing that makes you _good_ at the non-coding skills: People, Architecture, communications.
L5 at FAANG makes almost no decisions on their own but has to schedule a dozen meetings and pester a dozen people from various teams to "get alignment".
We still have to do the work to get the decision made without the fun part of just making the decision ourselves.
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.
It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack
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.
Smaller companies necessarily have a small team stretched across broad responsibilities, that usually describes startups. If it's scaling up then yeah, that changes. You want to join small teams for broad experience, startup or regular business.
It doesn't even take new leadership. As companies grow, they (have to) put more process in place, people tend to have narrower and more tightly defined responsibilities, and the person at a smaller company--even if not a startup--who was cowboying what they saw as needing doing can become a liability rather than an asset.
There are times where a big company needs to build something new (albeit within a constrained ecosystem and a very narrow swimming lane).
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job. It’s very possible he still made more money as a first-level manager, so it might’ve still been a net win for him.
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was money. My family member runs a software company, salaries came up recently and found out I make as much as their director.
I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:
> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
It depends on how many people he was in charge of. If he’s CTO of 500 people company where only 40 are engineers, you’re not getting past senior manager at faang.
Most of my titles have been pretty made-up (with acquiescence of manager). Never had the formal levels seen at large tech companies. Last job description was written for me and didn't even make a lot of sense if you squinted to hard. Made a couple of iterations for business cards over time.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
It doesn’t work like that. An “architect” at a small startup will get you maybe to a mid level position at BigTech if you pass the coding interview. The scale is completely different.
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.
I was raised in a rural city and as a kid I thought it was OK. I studied/worked in big cities and my city felt small. Later I returned and now that I turn 50 my small city feel OK again. Tltr: small cities are nice only when you are kid or old(ish)
I wouldn’t go that far. I moved from South GA in 1996 a week after graduating college. I am now back home visiting my parents for Christmas. Everything I hated about living in rural America is even worse now, the economy is even more hallowed out after the factories left and it’s more culturally backwards as all of the people who could leave - did.
My parents retired in their 50s in the early 2000s - mom a teacher and dad a factory worker and they are doing well.
When you have children, your life is mostly about the kids. It really doesn’t matter if you live in rural America.
As empty nesters, at 51 and 50, there is nothing interesting about rural America. I’m in South GA now visiting my parents with my wife. They spend all of the their time between yard work doing things around the house and church. My cousins who still live here and their lives are just as boring - unless they go out of town.
> They spend all of the their time between yard work
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I have two female cousins who are divorced and whose children are grown or nearly so. They are both in their late 40s, early 50s. They still live in my hometown. Guess how much they hate it here (I’m home for the holidays)?
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
I... didn't really understand most of what you wrote in context of my post. Yes, if I were single I'd probably go for a city. My wife hasn't had a job since we had kids when I was 25, and I think we're in a much better financial state because it meant we had an easier time shifting our lives around the world for my job. I've never earnt big tech salary but I make more than was possible with the jobs I could access in New Zealand.
I (admitedly much younger than you) would think that assuming there's good internet and decent road connectivity, you could spend a lot of time on your interests and hobbies, no? My biggest hobbies (photography, diy audio) don't really need urban environments after the manufactured camera/woofer leaves the warehouse and ships to your home. Even easier perhaps if your interest is purely coding/laptop work (like writing a novel), I would think?
(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
The two times in my adult life that I was single (22-28 and 32-35), I would have been miserable in my hometown - as are almost everyone I talk to who is stuck here and single.
When I was single and younger, my hobbies were teaching fitness classes around the metro area and participating in group charity races with friends. We use to do one every month.
Yes. A lot of properties in a small town well outside a major city limit can feel pretty rural (and may not be super-expensive). You're probably not walking to a grocery store but you can likely drive to one in 15 minutes or so.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
I don't know exactly. Maybe $400K; haven't had appraised recently. One neighbor has a Christmas tree farm. The other has a pasture with horses. I don't personally have a huge amount of land--a bit over 4 acres. Don't do anything personally with my land.
But, basically, while Bay Area CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
Probably shaped by Bay area narratives, a lot of people assume that you're either living in the city or you're living in some remote rural location.
Very much so. Author here. I wanted to do so much more than the box they allocated me in. Once I knew they were not going to let me grow from my box, then I left. Not the level I was worried about, but it's a language most people can understand
The Box is very frustrating, especially when there's no one handling the other things, yet you're still not allowed to do them because it'd make the wrong people look bad.
I am at the stage of life where I appreciate this wisdom and desire the practice of it, but lack the will power to not get caught up “trying to win the game”. Once a while I get anxious about leveling and compensation, overwhelmed by comparison with peers. For people who had the similar struggles but managed to overcome, what worked for you?
- Surround yourself with friends who also aren’t playing the game.
- Get really clear about what your actual financial goals are, not what they’d need to be in order to maintain status among game-players.
- Get compensated in ways other than money. For me, working four days a week instead of five, and working remote from anywhere, is worth a whole lot of money. And working at a smaller company is a hell of a lot more fun if you like being part of product decisions.
- If you can, find ways to do things that your ladder-climbing friends can’t do. Spend a month in Europe without taking any holiday. Spend the whole winter in Thailand. Use that extra mental energy from that day off to do something amazing.
I left FAANG about 10 years ago and took a massive pay cut. I’d do it again.
By telling yourself it is ok to feel this way and going back to things you are good at, things that you love and people you care about and enjoy being with. Also exercise - that works.
There is nothing to overcome. These feelings rise up sporadically. Acknowledge and move on.
Getting a salary that pays rent/mortgage and puts food on the table doesn't always have to be about being in a rat race (which is what the "laddering" bs really means), to the contrary.
Because context is hard, I guess, my point is that "exiting the rat race" is generally something that only people with Mountain View addresses and opinions like "400k TC really isn't THAT much, if you think about it" tend to be able to do.
Exactly, that’s why I feel pity for the people who destroy their lives to get paid extra 5% and having a pizza party with good boy remarks, and of course making someone else wealthier too. It’s not a flex to sleep in a tent at work, while neglecting your health, family, friends, maybe kids, this “grind” culture is pushed by corporations for obvious reasons.
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.
E6 -> E7 at Meta is $1M (which sounds a little bit crazy tbh). Google L6 -> L7 is 300k, but their numbers look smaller than what I'm privy too. A generic Level 6 to 7 (staff to senior staff) promotion can easily be $500k at a tech company.
And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k? It's one thing if you're not making enough to allow you and whoever else you might need to support to be happy and comfortable and be able to save enough for emergencies and retirement, but I'm dubious that someone only one other away from a half million dollar raise is in that position.
Something that's often overlooked is the time equivalent of money. If the average salary is $50k but you get $500k, you only have to work 1 year in every 10, and that's crazy.
And the feeling of safety that comes with it. I left my previous employer during an acquisition and took a year off and am taking my time to find the right next gig. I cannot imagine the terror of having to find a new job, any job, ASAP because otherwise we starve and lose the house. Substantial savings are honestly much nicer than spending on a lavish lifestyle.
yes thats true if you survive it. Have two friends with a salary over 300k a year. one worked 5 years and retired the other bought more luxury products to reflect his income and is now completly burned out after 3 years but forced to work because of his 300k a year lifestyle
at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.
i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.
> And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k?
A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.
I think you're overestimating how much making $800k versus $300k would actually make most people happier. You're welcome to disagree with me, but there's plenty of research indicating this might be the case (from a quick Google for "happiness self reported by income" this is the first result: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/does-more-money-correlate-g...).
If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
> The main finding of our reanalysis of MK’s study is that the shape of the distribution of happiness changes—slightly, but systematically—as income rises. The same increases of income have different effects on the happy and on the unhappy regions of the distribution. In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do. In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do. The upper part of the happiness distribution rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate in that range, while the lower 20% is almost completely flat.
So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.
In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
>Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase.
not sure what you are getting at. Football is a made up game. People who play it well earn fame and fortune. yeah, don't beat yourself up for not being able to play it well, but don't pretend there is nothing there.
I mean, there really isn’t for the majority. Fame and fortune are fleeting; fame has a short half life (hence the phrase “15 minutes” of it) and fortunes can be lost as quickly as they’re made (80% of NFL players face financial distress after retirement). Not to mention that for every pro athlete there’s at least 100 that don’t make the cut.
The same is true in every field to varying degrees. For the average individual who can provide for themselves and their families, more money and fame only sounds good on paper. In reality, it invites more stress than anything else.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If the org truly cared about under-leveled employees, it would get fixed rapidly.
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.
You have to realize that a company is always optimizing for efficiency and salaries are no different.
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.
There isn't a single optimization. Define efficiency. Define over what time frame.
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
Why are people so determined to just shill for companies? Do you know how many people are unemployed for Christmas today, while you're out here tasting shoe leather for these organizations with more money than God?
They're not going to take pity on you, you know, no matter how much you grovel and beg.
At first I though it was a metaphorical hippy way of writing about this industry, which would have been par for the course, but it looks like the author really did mean it, he really does think in the ladder and "levelling" bs. All the best to him when it comes to climbing that ladder.
And yet we know techies love games and structured process. It is a clever way to make them do what you want to. Techies could have so much more power in the job market and yet they give it all up sadly.
right. also the whole job is bs to begin with. i don't know why this article is remotely interesting. it's a google job. that just tells me "i have skills but i don't know how to use them to make money"
See? That's his first problem--he bought into all that corpo bs that is placed there to steal your attention and keep you in their box. If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart. I guess smart people think they're smart about everything?
> If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart.
Logic is weird here. You're operating under the assumption that these orgs work perfectly.
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.
Having led the process from the other side, the more often your name comes up in a positive light, the better your chances. Odds are that OPs work simply wasn't mentioned much by his peers. The person you are replying to was absolutely on the money.
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Yet what you are saying is a bit different from the person I replied to (which I do agree with your final line). We also only have the information that the OP states. These are asymmetric information games so it is a bit naive to claim this for any response. Especially simple explanations.
I have seen this from the manager side at these kinds of companies, explaining to your manager that you are quitting because your level does not match your work is a waste of energy. Their hands are usually tied.
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.
At Google, in most orgs, manager can influence the chance of success significantly:
- Making sure their team works on what the org leads find "impactful"
- Facilitating cross team collaborations, which will lead to good peer reviews for your report
- Helping your report write the promo packet
- Presenting the promo case effectively during the calibration meeting and being prepared to advocate for the report and respond to criticism from other managers at the meeting
- etc.
There are many managers that do very few if any of these things, and it shows.
Yes, there are quotas, but nonetheless the manager plays a big role in whether their report makes the cut.
There is no harm in saying that you are quitting because you do not feel valued / rewarded enough. Hopefully it will effect change in the manager. Of course it's best to keep it polite and not burn any bridges in the process.
Honestly, I’ve worked at everything from small to medium lifestyle companies, startups, Big Enterprise, BigTech, and now Í am a staff consultant at a third party AWS consulting firm across 10 jobs.
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.
Author here. My manager and I discussed lengths about the capabilities they do, and it is just like this. It's not his fault at all. It's a game at the end of the day, and it's your choice whether or not you want to keep on playing
Having been at G and also getting denied promo several times consecutively, it's almost always a manager's fault. They're either not bringing the committee feedback to you properly or not representing your work well in that room. Either way it's a sign that they're unable to do better, and you're better off not reporting to the long term.
I think counter offers in general are pretty rare, especially in a bad job market. Like unicorn rare. In almost 30 years I’ve never left a company where it was even mentioned during the resignation. The company just says “Well, bye.” Like the Tombstone meme.
Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.
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.
Counteroffers for lower-level engineers are fairly rare. These companies believe that L4s are sufficiently common that another one will come along. It’s unfortunate especially when an L4 is seriously outperforming their level. But that’s a big company for you.
Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.
If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.
In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.
The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.
I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.
TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.
Ditto. From all the places that I’ve quit, the only counter offer I’d accept would be “we’ll implement this structure/process change that is slowly killing your will to work here”.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention that I think is really important...
If the company is prepared to offer you a big enough raise to tempt you to stay, and able to organise that raise at short notice, why didn't they value you enough to give you that raise before then?
Yeah it honestly feels like the problem here – it's a common pattern where someone tries several times at a promo, then transfers to another team and gets promoted immediately.
All of this is true, though it's definitely worth noting that some managers are better than others at advocating for the promotion of their top performers.
Getting a manger who is too passive, or too checked-out, or just plain doesn't like you, can literally set you back in your career advancement by years.
Get lumped in with the wrong manager, in the eyes of the VP positions, and it can deadend your whole career. They can be a decent manager too. But if they aren’t compatible with their boss, it will burn you all the same.
If only there were some sort of way employees could get together and like... I don't know, use their labo- I mean, work energy as lever- I mean, to convince management to recognize their uni- I mean, get their boss to pay them more.
I have worked several union jobs, collective contracts usually don't touch the promotion process. If they do they often give automatic promotions after X years where X is still a fairly high number. And obviously this is not a great strategy for many reasons.
Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.
> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.
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.
Why not? People can't fake their way through a deeply technical, probing, 2-hour conversation.
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.
Funny enough, I got into my one only and hopefully last BigTech company without a single coding interview even though my job description required me to know how to code. It was all behavioral. It was for a cloud application architect position at AWS ProServe (yes direct hire with the standard 4 year structure between base + bonus + RSUs).
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?
It’s about 10% acceptance rate once you get the interview. I don’t know what stage of interview - HR, technical or behavioral/architecture interview. I’m in the interview pool for the last level.
Now imagine there are 1000 people who are capable of submitting an application that appears to match the job description. Do you have a way to help either winnow out the 750 worst or (better) identify the 50 best of the lot to start to engage in these 2-hour deeply technical discussions?
Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. 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.
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.
This sounds like a wild story, and I believe it. I love an underdog. Did you ever blog about this? It sounds interesting to read about.
No, never blogged about it. Don't want to put the guy on blast. We formed our own consultancy at one point and he ended up at a very senior position at a well-known SaaS, so good on him :)
The leetcode style tasks have nothing related to coding for the past 2 decades. That part is solved for a long time now. They ask for knowledge, which is a search away from everybody. I don’t know anybody, who knows those, and not only because of interviews. Also interviewers ask these, yet average code isn’t optimized at all. A simple question, like what’s your opinion of <anything> will tell you more than any leetcode question.
What happened with recommendation letters? Portfolio?
If I have 10+ years of proven experience with positive public recommendations written by high managers from F500 companies why should I be challenged with puzzles?
Talk an interview to figure out motivation and if we have the same vibe. Then hire me and decide a month later if I'm worth your money.
All of these are easily faked and/or not able to be shared. You think I can share code from FAANG?
Also, hiring is very expensive for those first few months at big tech. It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly - which is what would happen. Morale at faang is already hitting rock bottom due to the mandatory yearly+ 10%+ layoffs.
I have been running the exact same pair programming interview for ~100 candidates so far. Make a little exercise that is representative of your work, run everyone through it. Whatever you test for, that's what you should expect to get.
Interviews tuned properly for the position are almost always 95% talking with a decent trial/probation period. If they have the general credentials and can talk competently about the detail work, there is no benefit for either party doing these asinine code challenges.
The problems that spawn these leetcode barriers are WAY better solved at the source.
Prob 1: the interviewer doesn’t know shit about the actual role. I know it’s an uncommon opinion, but this should just not happen ever. I would gladly sit in on a speaking interview for my would-be coworkers, with the hiring manager, to check this. And the actual manager should be present and knowledgeable too. But 3 employees doing something is too much $ I guess.
Prob 2: credentials and high degrees are prolific, super mandatory, but also treated like they are meaningless. Experience is borderline ignored entirely. Worked with a software deeply for 10 years, but your cert is out of date? You won’t even get past the computerized HR filter. But because this is so openly stupid, companies tack on leetcode as another filter instead of rethinking the value of experience and relying on probation and bullshit detectors.
Excellent points. I just wonder about the 2-on-1 interviews. I think they tend to double-down on the one-sidedness of typical interviews.
It's not a group engineering meeting. Unless it's big-tech hiring of fungible worker drones, everyone in that meeting should be trying to get more signal about the others as individuals.
I've been the "1" in 2-on-1 three times recently, all for startups. For me, it's hard to think about the hard-thinking questions, and also be finding rapport and getting signal from two different people at once. I'd much rather spend twice as much of my time, to get each person 1-on-1, no additional cost to them.
Two of the recent 2-on-1 interviews were on videoconf, and, with the videoconf setup they chose, I couldn't even see one of the people most of the time.
The other interview was 3 people in tiny conference room/closet (the size of what used to be a one-person cubicle), for an hour, so it was especially stuffy and crowded with 3 people, and a great way to get Covid.
Besides more people complicating the situation, people tend to speak candidly with me 1-on-1, but are less likely to do that if their colleague is in the room or on the call.
Here's an intuition: Imagine you were a company interviewing startup candidates, and HR suggested saving time by you interviewing two candidates at once. It would be awful, and you wouldn't be able to get much read off of either (other than to tell if one or both were sharp-elbowed). So why do it 2-on-1 in the other direction, unless you're saying it's not important for a candidate to get signal about the company and colleagues?
Oh, I actually turned down a mostly great startup opportunity, basically over an n-on-1 interview.
I had a strong recommendation (halfway to hired, before they even met me, with a colleague's favorite ex-manager/mentor) to take over engineering and technical leadership, from a startup's technical CEO.
After I passed his interview, he had me do a 3-on-1 interview with the 3 engineering team members.
They all seemed a little awkward with the circumstances or format, and none opening up.
I passed the 3-on-1 from the CEO's perspective, and he gave me a written offer.
After I confirmed with him that one of the 3 existing engineers didn't want the role (I'd gotten a little leadership role vibe from him, despite 3-on-1), I asked to meet with at least one of the engineers 1-on-1, so I could get a better feel for the team.
The CEO pushed back hard on that, because what you see with them, is what you get.
We don't all get our intuitions the same way. Maybe the CEO could've gotten all the info he needed in a 3-on-1 videoconf meet&greet, including all the info I would get from 1-on-1. Or maybe I could've gotten info that he couldn't have, yet he seemed to be rejecting that possibility.
It might've been a great situation, but I ended up not taking it, arguably traceable to a low-info n-on-1 interview.
I mean, if the current Kafkaesque nightmare isn't working, then yes? You might as well read chicken entrails, at this point. At least then you'd get some diversity, if nothing else.
But the actual solution is to not let bean counters and bootcampers do the hiring, but we're a few too many programmer-generations away from anyone who actually knows what they're doing being left at most of these companies, so.
> The results of that meeting? The same from the previous promotion decisions; “it’s unfortunately a no. You don’t have enough impact.”
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 $$$.
All L4s are going to have supervision at Google, whether they “need” it or not. And most managers and tech leads aren’t going to just sit around twiddling their thumbs when no one “needs” supervision. Because most of them are bad at their jobs (I can count the number of good managers I’ve seen in 20 years on one hand).
I would go further and say that the entire system is designed to not promote people. It is there as a barrier to promotion and upward potential. The upward moves are saved completely for the in-crowd people. I'm sure at places like Google it is brutally difficult to move up the ladder at all.
Author here. I like statement. I think the biggest thing here is "not meeting this mark isn't a value statement"
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
The problems of lack of independence are rarely the kind of thing you decide in a big leveling meeting though: Someone working in near the project has to be providing the feedback regarding the employee needing more supervision. If that's the reason someone fails to uplevel, the manager and the dev lead are failing you, or outright saying something different for your packet than they say to your face.
Multiple denied promo applications. Warm, caring language but no attempt at retention on resignation. Other companies unsure of hiring candidate even after 10+ interviews.
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.
Author here. I do agree to an extent. But getting datpoints from the other people in the company at those higher positions is important. Asking what can you do to improve and what you can do to make better impact. For my situation, many people did agree that they agreed that I should be up leveled. Some people did say I could work on different projects but they have seen people get up leveled for way less. Some of it is luck as well.
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
Don’t listen to defeatist BS. If a candidate needs to grow, the response should be to give them small projects to lead and grow. A few university classes in missing subjects, coaching, etc. Not keep them in purgatory.
Yeah. I really feel for this guy. I'm at a bigco too and at my yoe, I would really like to be officially "senior".
But if I'm being honest with myself I have a bit of growing to do before I am there. The limiting factor is definitely me. I am improving every year but my peers are excellent.
I'm not "senior", but I'm enjoying my work, I'm making more than I ever have, and I'm improving as an IC.
I can't quite tell from OPs account if he really is the one being wronged in this situation. But I also think places like Google are not for everyone. At least from this post, I think they'll be happy with the new opportunity.
> 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.
> Do say: "I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer."
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".
There's no such thing as a "hands-on leading developer" on a "large-scale refactor" at Google, it'd be like saying you were the hands-on leading mechanic on building the 787 dreamliner.
FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.
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!
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.
As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.
So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.
That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.
Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.
(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)
You look for impact, not how much it took time. There are people that work a lot, but have no real outcomes. Also this particular type of resume is popular because google has promoted this style
Impact can vary wildly between companies and circumstances given the same inputs however, so indexing on that can be misleading in interviews.
I've moved big revenue metrics with relatively simple projects. Anyone else could have done the same thing. And I was building on work that lots of product people and other engineers performed. That "impact" doesn't tell you anything about what I can bring to a new company with different systems and products.
I'm writing this without reading the comments first but oh boy, I wanted to punch a stone wall while I was reading this. I don't tolerate any company that has more than 3 interviews for a position, it's an automatic "no, sorry, I have better things to do with my life", and I tried, believe me, Red Hat had 6, Creative Assembly burnt me with 2 personal and 3 technical, all on-site on different dates (edit for peace of mind: these interviews were 13 years ago, it's fine...)
Maybe it's my own personal working culture, but when I get into a company I'm not thinking about levels, growth, stock options... I go there with a salary, a position and a willingness to help in whatever I can, once I'm not needed anymore (it's usually a combination of managerial direction changes, new hires, new objectives) that's my cue to help somewhere else where I may be needed or wanted. Am I that weird? I honestly don't understand this culture of quarter finance agent, half developer, quarter manager aspirant :/
This is an interesting contrast to the "don't become the machine" article.
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"
> 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.
And it shows through in the product. YouTube’s website is one of the 7 Wonders of UX Feces and they are climbing the ranks at a steady rate.
The difference is that the guy has moderate success, while don’t become the machine is a starving student who bought into Andrew Tate instagram kool-aid bullshit. Money is a hell of a drug once you’ve tasted it.
Sure, not that exact hierarchy. But a hierarchy. At other places it might be Senior, Principal, Director, etc. at some places they’re given, at other places you fight for it. Variations of leveling.
Google is a somewhat widely known place where promo is a huge problem, but the problem isn’t particular to Google. Generally companies will require you to repeatedly “prove” you are worth the additional compensation before agreeing to it. The friction varies, but the structural incentives are always there. Therefore if the goal is to maximize earnings, and assuming you are a high performer, it’s in your best interest to job hop once in a while.
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.
There's a third way. Think about maximizing salary to effort ratio instead of total salary. It might be the case that lower position has better ratio. Quiet quitting where people do bare minimum not to get fired is essentially this theory put into practice. You want to avoid a situation where you're rich but too stressed out to do anything with that money.
This is me, within limits of course. I work on 90% contract, having 10 weeks of paid vacation and sure as hell try to use that to the fullest.
Life is too short to focus on stuff that would lead to deep regrets later. I dont know about you guys but focusing all the time on money and career certainly feels like one, IT engineering is too successful to really have the need to behave so, so it becomes a choice.
I do focus on those but in short bursts and them coast the results for long time. Ie push through some boundary (lengthy acquiring of property, planning and realizing big reconstruction, naturalization process for me and family etc). I never grokked the 'completionist' mindset as a default one, its endless toil and unhappiness in big corporations.
I feel this is easier if you treat day jobs almost as a side hustle and have significant hobbies and life elsewhere. It’s more difficult if your career heavily overlaps with what you love doing (e.g. software), except the career comes with unwanted things like politics, promos, managing others, etc.
I think this pattern of "under promotion" is probably common is all highly competitive industries with large wealth corps. Think: Investment banking ("high finance"), oil & gas, big tech, law firms, consulting, etc. When I think about the sheer number of insanely talented people trying to get in, it conjures the World War Z image of zombies trying to get over the walls. With some perspective in my industry, I constantly remind myself: There are many, many more people outside my office that can do my job -- probably better than me. I need to constantly remind my employer why I am good. (Yes, it is exhausting.)
My new job title says "senior". It means nothing within the company except a 5% pay bracket or something, but I don't have to tell the next company that. I understand this is the mechanism by which titles result in money.
Optimising YouTube viewing time is a terrible goal to devote your life to in my opinion. I'm not sure if OP ever thought too deeply about what he was working on, but addicting people to a screen is not one I consider a value to society.
I can’t wrap my mind around those goals, because (IMHO) the number one thing that would improve viewership is entirety outside of YouTube’s hand: content quality. So the author can only ever move needles that are thrice removed (i.e.: improving backend tools -> creators have more time -> creators create better content) or are statistical coincidences (we made the buttons round -> viewership went up 0.2%).
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction. If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it… implies a fear of making mistakes… The company with 13 rounds was fishing for a reason to say "no”
I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.
I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.
Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.
Youtube is getting problematic. I write this as someone
who basically has some videos running in the background
all the time, mostly just DJ music in the background.
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.
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber. Just yesterday I found myself opening a private window to watch a video with ads, rather than letting the algorithm know I was watching the video on my account. Even if I remove the video from my watch history, YouTube can’t help itself. You make a great point on stale content and the overall enshittification is becoming intolerable.
Pay a little extra for YouTube Premium Family and you can silo your interests to different Google profiles. I have work and home like this basically. Coding, AI, etc on one, cars, retro games on another. No ads.
idk though, YouTube Premium is pretty good value if you're using it enough to care about recommendation hygiene. I remember the days everyone was begging to have the option to pay to skip ads. Well, YouTube did what we wanted, and now we're complaining about it for some reason.
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.
>The problem of "doing more work and not getting compensated" is pretty well-known.
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.
Author here. I do want to mention that I don't exactly know the situation my manager was in, but he definitely did not make me feel dispensible personally. He and I had long conversations about life and work and our own lives and how the company will continue.
Some manager may seem this way, but my manager (and the other direct managers I had I YouTube) felt the most human and caring people I have met. They had goals to meet, but I also felt they really cared for me (and their other reports). So I really thank them for that.
Reading this I feel like I live on another planet.
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?
You do live in a different, underprivileged world. Many Google engineers have never not heard back from a job app.
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.
Yeah unless you legitimately enjoy it, want the experience, or want to save up some money for a while - I don’t think it’s worth it (coming from someone that spent 10+ yrs at FAANG).
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.
I'm not sure I agree with this one, I think a lot of people are drawn to software because of the money in the same way people are drawn to being a doctor or lawyer - the job itself overlaps with their innate skills and interests __enough__, and there's the promise of good pay on top of that. I think a lot of software engineers would be in other fields if it paid badly.
I've been at three FAANGs now and my experience has been that nobody really cares about your level for day-to-day work. The only times it has ever come up for me is when a) I was part of assembling a new team and we needed a mix of juniors and seniors or b) when some dangerous action like deploying during a holiday code freeze needed approval from an L9+ by policy, so you had to go find that person and justify it to them.
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.
Why did you bounce around faangs if you don’t mind me asking? Reading this site it seems… not uncommon, but I don’t understand why. Finding and starting a new job stinks haha.
I bounced from Amazon to Microsoft to Amazon to Microsoft to Facebook. Why? Because the grass is always greener on the other side. Amazon didn't pay enough, Microsoft was too boring, Amazon was too chaotic, and then Facebook paid much more. All bad decisions, but I only know that in hindsight. I'm not very smart.
Oh gosh, I didn’t mean to imply it was poor decision making, I was just curious. You’re a better person than me for putting up with the interview process. I absolutely refuse to grind leetcode problems. My TC at the moment is probably a lot less than what you’ve made though. Always tradeoffs.
No worries, I didn't sense any criticism. I've just become more critical of my own decisions, now that I have some perspective and it seems to me that most of what I did was poorly considered.
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.
I did stay at Microsoft for a total of 15 years, but in retrospect it's the least interesting place to work. 5% coding, 95% overhead.
Of the places I've worked, none of them had anything where I can now say "I should have stayed there for longer." Amazon and Meta have obnoxious aggressive culture. Microsoft is a place where you can chill out and collect a paycheck and good health insurance. But very boring.
I also worked at some much smaller companies, but not for long. Maybe those are more interesting, but also less stable.
> this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible.
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.
Reality is that different resources have different impacts on an eng. org. Some individuals are eng. orgs onto themselves and can own a whole stack (breadth). Some are very specialized in areas that require deep expertise or experience (depth). Some are good engineers, but lack both breadth and depth of knowledge. Leveling let's you delineate comp bands accordingly.
I had never heard that expression until I read this article today, and I spent a very big chunk of my career at FAANGs. I think he just invented it. NDAs were never a problem for me when switching jobs either.
The article was interesting and much of it rang true, but not this detail.
Author here. I do feel incredibly luck in my position. This is a very specific perspective that I have, and I'm sorry that I may have seemed too entitled in this post. My whole goal was to point out to value yourself and don't let the company define you.
Leveling: it is kinda dystopian, but it's easier to define a ladder because it is something someone can work towards (like a skill tree). There are pros and cons, easily definable but dehumanizing. But it's something common in a lot of mid to large size tech companies.
I did leave this year, and that was after two and a half years of trying. It's a lot of trail and error. I did 7 in person interviews. Each session was 2-4 interviews each. And other than the first 3, I felt really confident in each one. But none but the last one I actually got a callback from. And countless other interviews before that that were online or not in-person. It's rough out there.
And NDA at YouTube is something that I was just super careful of. Google lawyers were something I didn't want to deal with later on and I heard some horror stories from other people that left before.
It may not be what is mainstream but this is what happened to me and I thought it might be informational and helpful for people who feel stuck or not as valued. I hope people feel valued at work, at the least.
I hope your search gets better this year! And merry Christmas!
> 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).
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.
At Amazon, level is public. Microsoft, only the title (Senior etc) is visible not the precise level is visible is my impression. At Google, it can be public but apparently can also be hidden. At Facebook it's always hidden.
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 was leaving because I had outgrown the pot I was planted in
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.
Author here. I debated this, but the state of Google and YouTube together and certain things internally led me to just look for external opportunities.
Did you get a pay rise moving externally? One very negative thing I have found in my career: Exactly zero internal moves come with a pay rise, but nearly all external moves come with a pay rise. The choice is easy for me.
I don't mean this to be a callout, but what do you mean you led teams as an L4? Even if you were unofficially leading them, you get caught in the politics trap of not being able to claim any credit for having done so, because that means the higher levels in the workstream weren't doing their jobs, and you can't write that down or say it outloud. This is a problem in every hierarchical organization, and learning how to navigate it is unfortunately a part of the leveling process in itself when you are starting from a lower level versus being hired into a higher one.
> Your level dictates your salary, your stock grants, and most importantly, the scope of problems you are allowed to solve. I found myself in a situation common to many engineers at large organizations. I was operating at a “Senior” or “Staff" level (...) but my official title and compensation were stuck at just above junior level.
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.
To be fair, if you're a higher level you're more likely to be tasked with problems that have a wider scope, as opposed to having to actively seek them out and balance them against day to day work.
When I read about the culture at Google, and similarly YouTube, I am constantly reminded of how (and probably why) their products have stagnated/gotten worse over time despite having top engineers. I believe Google has the talent to build anything in their wildest dreams. So why do their products suck? YouTube sucks from the user POV, Google classroom sucks, the user experience in their office suite leaves a tremendous amount to be desired for even a basic user like me, Android never improves, their voice recognition and assistant are trash. There's so much room for competition, I wonder where it is? What are they spending their money and talent on (besides AI)? I feel like it must primarily be on reliability, speed, and delivering more ads.
This is why it's honestly not worth working that hard. Work hard enough to get noticed, spend the rest of the time making sure the right people know what you're doing. After a certain point it just doesn't matter anymore. The company has quarterlies to hit, and they aren't going to budge from whatever they have allowed for salary. And they're going to take the money they won't pay you and put it in an exec bonus package.
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.
i would like to push back a bit on this and say, it is worth working hard, but i would argue a lot of programmers get hindered by the illusion that programming is important, or even delivering results. unfortunately in software this is exacerbated by the very real world-wide impact that programming actually does have, but: it will always be subjugated by the most important job...
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.
> quitting a mag7 like google is objectively a step down whichever way you slice it.
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?
If you look at my comment again you'll see I said "work hard enough to get noticed... And make sure the right people know". I'm saying the same thing you are. You also don't have to be a Tyrion Lanister level political manipulator to get ahead. You mostly just have to make sure a few key people are aware of you and like you.
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.
> From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability
He didn’t have to care that deeply. Alphabet expected from him L4 work. He got paid as a L4. It’s just fair that he also delivered L4 work and spent his effort on something more useful
I went through a loop at Meta that was probably 10-11 rounds. I would have done 100. The compensation is truly life changing and the engineering problems were world-class.
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 really doesn't make much sense. The article was actually insightful on this point, or at least this matches my experience:
> 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.
It really sucks to feel so undervalued. I have been working with WITCH company and the entire promotion leveling is based on favoritism. With this 90 days of Notice Period, it is nearly impossible to get through even first round of interview. Every day is a struggle to prove yourself to the handicapped managers and self doubt whether you are even worth something to leave this job and try something else. 10 years and each day is a painful struggle.
> Hunting for a job is a full-time occupation. Doing so while maintaining high performance at a demanding job like YouTube is a recipe for cognitive fracture.
You don't need to maintain it that high, just enough not to get fired within the expected time to find a new one?
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction.
Indeed, but since you understand it, you also don't have to waste your time 13 times?
Re. (1): It can really depend on what they did before and during school. While in school, one could have real internships, real personal projects, open-source contributions, working for the university, contract gigs, etc.
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.
Author here. I worked at internships and smaller contracts in HS and college. But I've been coding since the start of highschool with coding competitions and jobs that helped my neighbors and my grandparents. Even in retrospect, even though they were small or not as full time as what I did now, I would still count them as learning career experience
And I have been hired somewhere else. I was really close just to quit early and go to contract work. But I got really lucky with an offer a few months ago. If someone's feels like they want to quit, definitely investigate the amount of work it will take to be self employed. It's a lot, but understanding your own skills and being able to market that is a great ability to learn!
My man, if some Joe went as a salesman with 20 years of experience because every summer he sold some lemonade since he was 5, people would, well, at the very best pat one with “good for you, buddy, good for you.”
Then again, “fake it till you make it” is known to work too, so you do you. Definitely wouldn’t judge you in this economy to employ every trick in the book.
Re 2), this reminds me of those situations where people are given the opportunity to resign rather than being fired. They get to save face on their next job interview, but it does the next hiring company a disservice. It might be something that comes up later in the hiring process, but nothing that would be identifiable at the start of that process
I used to related with what the OP says and if he’s under 35 makes sense to jump to another adventure.
Anyways, a friend of mine told me the complete opposite than the OP after not being selected to a promotion 2x: He stayed competitive enough to the market in case of any issue, but at the same time he slightly moving to the “Dead Sea” existence where the tenure created a small co-dependence between himself and its employer.
His employer knows that he’s working at a discount in comparison to offshoring his job, but at the same time even being a L4 like can enjoy a lot of free time and agency to know when and where to throttle his productivity.
Author here. They do, even most recruiters require this before submitting for some of these jobs. Most hiring managers also filter that out by behavioral interviews and seeing how you handle team work, large scale work, and discussion upwards and downwards. Especially the higher you go, the harder it is to lie to get through.
I'm in a similar situation but I also have a direct report who is clearly displeased at the lack of leveling available to us. All I can do is empathize with them.
Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?
The levels are very similar to all those hierarchy used in big corporations outside of the tech. Classic selection and grooming techniques. We all get to decide if we want to play that game or not.
Author here. I'm touched by whoever posted this here. I hope people can read this and feel empowered to value themselves and try to make the impact they feel like they can.
Currently in a similar situation. Stuck at L5 and failed the L6 transition due to: "The trajectory is good, but there is not enough evidence showing that you are consistently performing at L6".
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
Yes, you're out earning most SWEs, certainly almost all in Europe. Congrats. I'd be optimizing for a lack of stress and working on interesting things, but also my personal life to bring progression and accomplishment.
I really don't feel it's that unique that it took a while to quit. A big reason these cultures are so popular is because a lot of of the time people don't quit right away and you can keep extracting work above their pay grade until they do. Even if you have some churn, you can keep getting that kind of work for cheap as long as you have a good supply of new hires.
What matters is being (1) happy with your job (2) having an excellent life-work balance and (3) fair or better compensation. The rest is just fuel to the ego and it means nothing.
If you want to drive projects, do it at your own free time.
You are just a liability to the investors and that's why everyone actually wants AI
> And I had to highlight the incredibly talented team I worked with and the amazing managers that taught me so much.
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.
To the author: was there an open process to move to another role within your previous company? That could be another path to finding a better environment where one could grow in salary and responsibility?
I learnt a long time ago that there is no such thing as loyalty with regards to work and that if you want to get the most compensation for what you do you need keep moving until you find the place where you happy with the compensation and equally the culture.
However things will change, either at home or at work so you need to balance those out.
When I started out I had this misplaced sense of loyalty to my first job I liked and it really held me back, they paid really low wages but for some reason I felt lucky to work there.
I changed my mindset and realised I’m selling my time to them so I might as well get the best return on my time in both compensation and enjoyment.
The bottom line is you don’t have to except poor pay, bad culture and boring work. You’re in control of your life.
EDIT
Also don’t be scared to ask for a pay rise or bonus. I make a point of doing it at each review and I check its progress in most one to ones. At the end of the day its your responsibility to get paid, you’re employer not matter how good they are us always going to try and save on opex, do you need to take ownership and make sure you’re getting paid what makes you happy.
> If you're a white or Asian dude, everyone assumes you're good at coding, just by default. You could have graduated yesterday with a degree in law, and people assume you can code
> If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy [...] the companies with 5 to 8 rounds had the clearest internal culture
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.
Love how he’s critical of the 13-interview hiring process despite having done all 13 of those interviews.
“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.
13 interviews suggests he was interviewing for multiple roles within the same company; in which case it's not that shocking. In many places every team runs their own interviews.
I’ve never seen someone skip the interview process or get it shortened through a referral. At best it will move your resume to the top of the big pile, which is very helpful, but I don’t think they help much more than that.
I haven't personally seen it either, but there are many commentors on HN (it comes up every time there is a thread about interviewing) that describe precisely that.
I’ve never worked at a more soul crushing company. The bureaucracy is worse than the government. There are too many embedded multi-millionaires with 15+ years tenure that don’t give a shit and don’t even respond to buganizer tickets.
If you come across a resume from anyone with more than 5 years at Google throw it away. It means they thrive in an environment where nothing gets done.
Google is a company which spies on its users, and manipulates search results and recommendations against user interests to further external and internal-corporate interests. This manipulation happens specifically on YouTube. On that platform it also executed the "adpocalypse" in 2017, and other measures.
The intrepid author, however, has not a word to say about any of that. "I just work(ed) here" is the implicit statement. He's preoccupied with his leveling and his personal advancement.
Is that typical of Google software engineers? I wonder.
> Gemini made - “Telling my manager I’m quitting and both of us are upset about it"
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 read the title and thought it would be about migrating from youtube to something self hosted/self made. Oh well :) Good luck in your future endeavors or sorry about your "ai" layoff, whichever applies.
And??? Where did you go? Did you get L5/L6? Or did you just leave and not get another job? What a wild article to have the interviews so prominently featured but not have a conclusion.
People in my experience usually don’t post about their new employer until they’re settled in for one or two months in order to not bad mouth a new employer which didn’t work out as expected.
But I was really about to quit with a job lined up. I gave myself to the end of 2025 to get a new job. I had savings enough to hold me off, but it was one of those things where I was ready to even do freelance or contract. Putting more time in searching and portfolios. I'd rather get more time making code that was publicly available on GitHub to show my prowness than just talking about it to people.
And I had an incredible support system from my partner. I wouldn't feel comfortable taking this leap without her. :)
You’re thinking about the “Professional Engineer” title or some variant thereof.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but why did the author not mark this post as AI generated? It's clear from many different phrasings that this was written with an LLM. And no, I won't point out any particular spot, but I'm sure my fellow commenters will know what I am talking about.
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?
Tried to read through the article, but couldn't finish. I felt this writing heavily alluded to a ChatGPT generated response. Too many punchlines and paragraph breaks.
Why must you insist it's LLM-generated based on formatting and feel? What if this is just how the author writes? This is what I mean by overzealous pattern matching.
If paragraph breaks are a sign of LLM slop now, then I’m in trouble. The ones in my blog posts are rarely longer than 2 sentences and they are all handcrafted.
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
Not that alone. But the way sentences are formed, add it with those frequent pauses, punchlines that are punchy for the sake of it, and that last AI generated image --- all point at an inorganic article. I was just pointing it out, I do not understand the downvotes for it.
>The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.
>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.
We geeks often like to go deep, and engineers who persist with shallow understanding of tech hit limits. But as you get more responsibility, getting quickly oriented to project/task/business stuff is extremely valuable. And tbh, doing the same for tech topics is valuable but harder to do.
> In the software engineering world, we exist on a ladder. We call this ”Leveling”.
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.
Totally agree.
In my 25 years in tech, there were no meritocracies. I came from a simple working class upbringing and experienced upward mobility into the white collar class.
I differentiated myself by always finding ways to solve problems, that others weren’t willing to do. People expected things to be done a certain way, I expected nothing and did everything myself my own way.
I never had mentorship that taught me “how to play the game”. People saw me as a threat, some would copy my work and take credit for it. I don’t have the mentality to fight with people over a game, so I let people win, to my detriment.
I never had hunger for title or compensation, so it was never offered to me unless I voiced my desire to exit.
My friends who played the game are sitting on a fortune, where they have more material possessions, but their kids are struggling and they are struggling, to find peace and happiness, because they are “owned” by the game. They have no substance in their life and compare themselves to others who play the game. A endless cycle of jealously.
I sit here with peace and very high life satisfaction, understanding I have skills that help people, that fulfill a purpose, that comes with healthy integration with my unbreakable values.
Learning to think independently while ignoring superficial reward signals with focus on self concordant goals is the recipe to life satisfaction.
For once, I wish I could upvote more than once.
Cheers :)
Merry Christmas !!! :)
+1. Worth saying this is also not at all a software engineering thing, it’s a large organization thing. I found I could easily discuss career leveling with non-technical government employees. In fact they have much more context than my friends in software engineering that never worked for large companies.
True.
Except for the economics part, it is much more fulfilling to work for a smaller company.
Except for the money - the entire reason most people work everyday…
I’m 51, worked at two F10 at the time companies out of my ten jobs and hated them both - GE and 8 years later Amazon. I purposefully made the choice of pursuing a smaller company and ignoring constant outreach from Google (GCP consulting division). But let’s not dismiss the close to $100K diference I could be making than what I make now.
Also a 25 year old SA that I mentored at AWS three years ago is making the same as I am making. They are an L5 (mid level) and I am a staff consultant. They are pre-sales (no commission) and I am implementations.
Money is a factor.
I went from, if not scraping by, never really recovered from dot-bomb to a pretty good job at a medium-size public company latterly. It was "mostly" good. But the difference in money set me up in a way that I previously really wasn't (even if not top tech levels).
The worst part about this is that the level is largely made up. Its a social construct.
for example a "senior engineer" at a FAANG has more "value" than lead engineer at a no-name startup.
However the skill gap between a lead engineer of a team of 6 vs a "senior engineer" at FAANG is massive.
a "Senior Engineer" (ie [e|l]5/6 at a faang) makes almost no product decisions. There is a team that makes the GUI, product, marketing, infra, and then a bunch of sub teams that look after the specific part that you are currently dealing with.
Your startup person has to make all those decisions them selves and communicate/delegate it
Being an 6/7 feels like being a teenager with a coddling parent by comparison.
But! the point is this, that name, is all just an illusion. There are plenty of E6s at FAANG that are mediocre, there are plenty of E3s that are leaders.
You must make your own worth. Sure you might be working at a no-name company, but that doesn't mean you can't be _good_. The thing that makes you _good_ at the non-coding skills: People, Architecture, communications.
L5 at FAANG makes almost no decisions on their own but has to schedule a dozen meetings and pester a dozen people from various teams to "get alignment".
We still have to do the work to get the decision made without the fun part of just making the decision ourselves.
Man, I really thought I’d be doing Cool Things at FAANG but startups are a lot more interesting and a lot less backstabby.
Sigh
Yes you can be good at a no name company. But you won’t get paid nearly as much
> Take the bits you want (money, skills)
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.
It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack
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.
Smaller companies necessarily have a small team stretched across broad responsibilities, that usually describes startups. If it's scaling up then yeah, that changes. You want to join small teams for broad experience, startup or regular business.
It doesn't even take new leadership. As companies grow, they (have to) put more process in place, people tend to have narrower and more tightly defined responsibilities, and the person at a smaller company--even if not a startup--who was cowboying what they saw as needing doing can become a liability rather than an asset.
There are times where a big company needs to build something new (albeit within a constrained ecosystem and a very narrow swimming lane).
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.
Well of course, if you were CTO of a company of 10, you can't expect to be hired as CTO of Google.
My first manager at a big tech co was the CTO of a 500 person company. He was down-leveled to being a first-level manager.
There is so much interesting to unpack here.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job. It’s very possible he still made more money as a first-level manager, so it might’ve still been a net win for him.
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was money. My family member runs a software company, salaries came up recently and found out I make as much as their director.
It is quite common for CTOs of smaller companies to be hired as team leaders into bigger companies; nothing wrong with that.
I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:
> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
It’s wrong if it’s a 500 person tech company. There are divisions in big tech which don’t have 500 people in them.
It depends on how many people he was in charge of. If he’s CTO of 500 people company where only 40 are engineers, you’re not getting past senior manager at faang.
This is why titles on biz cards are funny.
Most of my titles have been pretty made-up (with acquiescence of manager). Never had the formal levels seen at large tech companies. Last job description was written for me and didn't even make a lot of sense if you squinted to hard. Made a couple of iterations for business cards over time.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
Once a person where I was tech lead asked to leave because he told me his salary wasn't enough.
I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I asked the company for him to stay he got at least 1.7X
Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary
After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.
First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL
It doesn’t work like that. An “architect” at a small startup will get you maybe to a mid level position at BigTech if you pass the coding interview. The scale is completely different.
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.
I said "F-this" 20 years ago, moved to the middle of nowhere, paid cash for my property and live on next to nothing. Best decision ever.
I was raised in a rural city and as a kid I thought it was OK. I studied/worked in big cities and my city felt small. Later I returned and now that I turn 50 my small city feel OK again. Tltr: small cities are nice only when you are kid or old(ish)
I wouldn’t go that far. I moved from South GA in 1996 a week after graduating college. I am now back home visiting my parents for Christmas. Everything I hated about living in rural America is even worse now, the economy is even more hallowed out after the factories left and it’s more culturally backwards as all of the people who could leave - did.
My parents retired in their 50s in the early 2000s - mom a teacher and dad a factory worker and they are doing well.
Biggest dream of mine but almost impossible if you're married. Women hate it out it in the middle of nowhere.
Not all women. I'm married and have four children.
When you have children, your life is mostly about the kids. It really doesn’t matter if you live in rural America.
As empty nesters, at 51 and 50, there is nothing interesting about rural America. I’m in South GA now visiting my parents with my wife. They spend all of the their time between yard work doing things around the house and church. My cousins who still live here and their lives are just as boring - unless they go out of town.
> They spend all of the their time between yard work
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I have two female cousins who are divorced and whose children are grown or nearly so. They are both in their late 40s, early 50s. They still live in my hometown. Guess how much they hate it here (I’m home for the holidays)?
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
I... didn't really understand most of what you wrote in context of my post. Yes, if I were single I'd probably go for a city. My wife hasn't had a job since we had kids when I was 25, and I think we're in a much better financial state because it meant we had an easier time shifting our lives around the world for my job. I've never earnt big tech salary but I make more than was possible with the jobs I could access in New Zealand.
I (admitedly much younger than you) would think that assuming there's good internet and decent road connectivity, you could spend a lot of time on your interests and hobbies, no? My biggest hobbies (photography, diy audio) don't really need urban environments after the manufactured camera/woofer leaves the warehouse and ships to your home. Even easier perhaps if your interest is purely coding/laptop work (like writing a novel), I would think?
(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
The two times in my adult life that I was single (22-28 and 32-35), I would have been miserable in my hometown - as are almost everyone I talk to who is stuck here and single.
When I was single and younger, my hobbies were teaching fitness classes around the metro area and participating in group charity races with friends. We use to do one every month.
The compromise is an exurb. Some of them are in rural areas but still close to the amenities of big cities (such as Costco).
Yes. A lot of properties in a small town well outside a major city limit can feel pretty rural (and may not be super-expensive). You're probably not walking to a grocery store but you can likely drive to one in 15 minutes or so.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
That sounds amazing. What are prices like for a property like that? Do you do anything with the land?
I don't know exactly. Maybe $400K; haven't had appraised recently. One neighbor has a Christmas tree farm. The other has a pasture with horses. I don't personally have a huge amount of land--a bit over 4 acres. Don't do anything personally with my land.
But, basically, while Bay Area CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
Probably shaped by Bay area narratives, a lot of people assume that you're either living in the city or you're living in some remote rural location.
Where'd you move? Do you miss the big city amenities?
Very much so. Author here. I wanted to do so much more than the box they allocated me in. Once I knew they were not going to let me grow from my box, then I left. Not the level I was worried about, but it's a language most people can understand
Any chance the problem with your promotion was someone above you taking credit for your work?
The Box is very frustrating, especially when there's no one handling the other things, yet you're still not allowed to do them because it'd make the wrong people look bad.
I am at the stage of life where I appreciate this wisdom and desire the practice of it, but lack the will power to not get caught up “trying to win the game”. Once a while I get anxious about leveling and compensation, overwhelmed by comparison with peers. For people who had the similar struggles but managed to overcome, what worked for you?
- Surround yourself with friends who also aren’t playing the game.
- Get really clear about what your actual financial goals are, not what they’d need to be in order to maintain status among game-players.
- Get compensated in ways other than money. For me, working four days a week instead of five, and working remote from anywhere, is worth a whole lot of money. And working at a smaller company is a hell of a lot more fun if you like being part of product decisions.
- If you can, find ways to do things that your ladder-climbing friends can’t do. Spend a month in Europe without taking any holiday. Spend the whole winter in Thailand. Use that extra mental energy from that day off to do something amazing.
I left FAANG about 10 years ago and took a massive pay cut. I’d do it again.
Are you working from Europe or have unlimited PTO?
That much time off at a small company sounds rare.
By telling yourself it is ok to feel this way and going back to things you are good at, things that you love and people you care about and enjoy being with. Also exercise - that works.
There is nothing to overcome. These feelings rise up sporadically. Acknowledge and move on.
Career is a made-up game, but man, being homeless and hungry sure does suck, eh?
Getting a salary that pays rent/mortgage and puts food on the table doesn't always have to be about being in a rat race (which is what the "laddering" bs really means), to the contrary.
How much does food and electricity cost for you right now?
A lot more compared to 3-4 years ago, still not reason enough to sell my soul and trying to re-enter the rat race.
"Just exit the rat race", says someone not facing repossession and foreclosure.
People generally have different needs. Some want expensive Porsche with their mortgage and food on the table.
Some want luxuries like insulin.
Sure, what's your point though? How much % do you donate out of your salary to fix global poverty?
Because context is hard, I guess, my point is that "exiting the rat race" is generally something that only people with Mountain View addresses and opinions like "400k TC really isn't THAT much, if you think about it" tend to be able to do.
Sure. And they have to accept the consequences of considering that a need.
Exactly, that’s why I feel pity for the people who destroy their lives to get paid extra 5% and having a pizza party with good boy remarks, and of course making someone else wealthier too. It’s not a flex to sleep in a tent at work, while neglecting your health, family, friends, maybe kids, this “grind” culture is pushed by corporations for obvious reasons.
Except at big tech the next level might be 500k more not 5%
That might be if you're hitting a "distinguished" level or moving from IC to M or M to E.
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.
E6 -> E7 at Meta is $1M (which sounds a little bit crazy tbh). Google L6 -> L7 is 300k, but their numbers look smaller than what I'm privy too. A generic Level 6 to 7 (staff to senior staff) promotion can easily be $500k at a tech company.
And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k? It's one thing if you're not making enough to allow you and whoever else you might need to support to be happy and comfortable and be able to save enough for emergencies and retirement, but I'm dubious that someone only one other away from a half million dollar raise is in that position.
Something that's often overlooked is the time equivalent of money. If the average salary is $50k but you get $500k, you only have to work 1 year in every 10, and that's crazy.
Source: got paid 180k and took 2 years off.
And the feeling of safety that comes with it. I left my previous employer during an acquisition and took a year off and am taking my time to find the right next gig. I cannot imagine the terror of having to find a new job, any job, ASAP because otherwise we starve and lose the house. Substantial savings are honestly much nicer than spending on a lavish lifestyle.
yes thats true if you survive it. Have two friends with a salary over 300k a year. one worked 5 years and retired the other bought more luxury products to reflect his income and is now completly burned out after 3 years but forced to work because of his 300k a year lifestyle
i make ~50k (well 70k) in japan.
at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.
i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.
> And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k?
A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.
I think you're overestimating how much making $800k versus $300k would actually make most people happier. You're welcome to disagree with me, but there's plenty of research indicating this might be the case (from a quick Google for "happiness self reported by income" this is the first result: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/does-more-money-correlate-g...).
If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
The difference might not make an enormous difference in my day to day but it allows me to retire significantly earlier.
It might let me actually buy a house too. 300k is not enough to afford anything in bay area.
Here you go https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
> The main finding of our reanalysis of MK’s study is that the shape of the distribution of happiness changes—slightly, but systematically—as income rises. The same increases of income have different effects on the happy and on the unhappy regions of the distribution. In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do. In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do. The upper part of the happiness distribution rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate in that range, while the lower 20% is almost completely flat.
So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.
In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
I could care less about your prestige. Most people care about the money that comes higher up the ladder and more importantly for me, the autonomy.
Yes I’m well aware that a “senior developer” in enterprise dev probably makes less than a new grad at BigTech.
>Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase.
not sure what you are getting at. Football is a made up game. People who play it well earn fame and fortune. yeah, don't beat yourself up for not being able to play it well, but don't pretend there is nothing there.
I mean, there really isn’t for the majority. Fame and fortune are fleeting; fame has a short half life (hence the phrase “15 minutes” of it) and fortunes can be lost as quickly as they’re made (80% of NFL players face financial distress after retirement). Not to mention that for every pro athlete there’s at least 100 that don’t make the cut.
The same is true in every field to varying degrees. For the average individual who can provide for themselves and their families, more money and fame only sounds good on paper. In reality, it invites more stress than anything else.
Veritasium made an excellent video on that: https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2024/1/15/what-the-longest...
The purpose of a system is what it does. If the org truly cared about under-leveled employees, it would get fixed rapidly.
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.
You have to realize that a company is always optimizing for efficiency and salaries are no different.
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.
There isn't a single optimization. Define efficiency. Define over what time frame.
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
> You have to realize that a company is always optimizing for efficiency
Must be “efficiency” why my coworkers have constant coffee breaks to talk about kids/sport/travel while MRs are open without comments for weeks.
Why are people so determined to just shill for companies? Do you know how many people are unemployed for Christmas today, while you're out here tasting shoe leather for these organizations with more money than God?
They're not going to take pity on you, you know, no matter how much you grovel and beg.
[flagged]
It took me a long time to realize this.
The amount of bits that we want is directly connected to where we are in the game.
There are extremes like "Ryan works his ass off for puny $50k/year" but generally you get what you give.
At first I though it was a metaphorical hippy way of writing about this industry, which would have been par for the course, but it looks like the author really did mean it, he really does think in the ladder and "levelling" bs. All the best to him when it comes to climbing that ladder.
>Career is a made up game.
And yet we know techies love games and structured process. It is a clever way to make them do what you want to. Techies could have so much more power in the job market and yet they give it all up sadly.
right. also the whole job is bs to begin with. i don't know why this article is remotely interesting. it's a google job. that just tells me "i have skills but i don't know how to use them to make money"
See? That's his first problem--he bought into all that corpo bs that is placed there to steal your attention and keep you in their box. If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart. I guess smart people think they're smart about everything?
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
Having led the process from the other side, the more often your name comes up in a positive light, the better your chances. Odds are that OPs work simply wasn't mentioned much by his peers. The person you are replying to was absolutely on the money.
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Yet what you are saying is a bit different from the person I replied to (which I do agree with your final line). We also only have the information that the OP states. These are asymmetric information games so it is a bit naive to claim this for any response. Especially simple explanations.
> If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart.
Oh sweet summer child. How old are you? Genuine question.
I have seen this from the manager side at these kinds of companies, explaining to your manager that you are quitting because your level does not match your work is a waste of energy. Their hands are usually tied.
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.
Hard disagree.
At Google, in most orgs, manager can influence the chance of success significantly:
- Making sure their team works on what the org leads find "impactful"
- Facilitating cross team collaborations, which will lead to good peer reviews for your report
- Helping your report write the promo packet
- Presenting the promo case effectively during the calibration meeting and being prepared to advocate for the report and respond to criticism from other managers at the meeting
- etc.
There are many managers that do very few if any of these things, and it shows.
Yes, there are quotas, but nonetheless the manager plays a big role in whether their report makes the cut.
There is no harm in saying that you are quitting because you do not feel valued / rewarded enough. Hopefully it will effect change in the manager. Of course it's best to keep it polite and not burn any bridges in the process.
Honestly, I’ve worked at everything from small to medium lifestyle companies, startups, Big Enterprise, BigTech, and now Í am a staff consultant at a third party AWS consulting firm across 10 jobs.
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.
> I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.
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.
Depends on the effectiveness of your union
Author here. My manager and I discussed lengths about the capabilities they do, and it is just like this. It's not his fault at all. It's a game at the end of the day, and it's your choice whether or not you want to keep on playing
Having been at G and also getting denied promo several times consecutively, it's almost always a manager's fault. They're either not bringing the committee feedback to you properly or not representing your work well in that room. Either way it's a sign that they're unable to do better, and you're better off not reporting to the long term.
Do you think retrospectively your manager may not have been as supportive of you as you had thought?
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?
I think counter offers in general are pretty rare, especially in a bad job market. Like unicorn rare. In almost 30 years I’ve never left a company where it was even mentioned during the resignation. The company just says “Well, bye.” Like the Tombstone meme.
Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.
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.
Counteroffers for lower-level engineers are fairly rare. These companies believe that L4s are sufficiently common that another one will come along. It’s unfortunate especially when an L4 is seriously outperforming their level. But that’s a big company for you.
Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.
If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.
In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.
The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.
I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.
TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.
Ditto. From all the places that I’ve quit, the only counter offer I’d accept would be “we’ll implement this structure/process change that is slowly killing your will to work here”.
Managers will happily make that promise. Just keep in mind that it's likely an empty one.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention that I think is really important...
If the company is prepared to offer you a big enough raise to tempt you to stay, and able to organise that raise at short notice, why didn't they value you enough to give you that raise before then?
Yeah it honestly feels like the problem here – it's a common pattern where someone tries several times at a promo, then transfers to another team and gets promoted immediately.
All of this is true, though it's definitely worth noting that some managers are better than others at advocating for the promotion of their top performers.
Getting a manger who is too passive, or too checked-out, or just plain doesn't like you, can literally set you back in your career advancement by years.
Get lumped in with the wrong manager, in the eyes of the VP positions, and it can deadend your whole career. They can be a decent manager too. But if they aren’t compatible with their boss, it will burn you all the same.
If only there were some sort of way employees could get together and like... I don't know, use their labo- I mean, work energy as lever- I mean, to convince management to recognize their uni- I mean, get their boss to pay them more.
I have worked several union jobs, collective contracts usually don't touch the promotion process. If they do they often give automatic promotions after X years where X is still a fairly high number. And obviously this is not a great strategy for many reasons.
Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.
> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.
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.
So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?
Why not? People can't fake their way through a deeply technical, probing, 2-hour conversation.
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.
Funny enough, I got into my one only and hopefully last BigTech company without a single coding interview even though my job description required me to know how to code. It was all behavioral. It was for a cloud application architect position at AWS ProServe (yes direct hire with the standard 4 year structure between base + bonus + RSUs).
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?
In my experience, by the time you get to do a full round interview your chances are pretty high, about 50% in big tech.
It’s about 10% acceptance rate once you get the interview. I don’t know what stage of interview - HR, technical or behavioral/architecture interview. I’m in the interview pool for the last level.
Now imagine there are 1000 people who are capable of submitting an application that appears to match the job description. Do you have a way to help either winnow out the 750 worst or (better) identify the 50 best of the lot to start to engage in these 2-hour deeply technical discussions?
Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. 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.
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.
No, never blogged about it. Don't want to put the guy on blast. We formed our own consultancy at one point and he ended up at a very senior position at a well-known SaaS, so good on him :)
Do CEOs and other executives have to go through leetcode-style interviews to be considered for their jobs?
If you think the engineer interview process is painful, try interviewing to be CEO of any company. I guarantee it will be _much_ more involved.
No because they aren’t coding.
Do they go through leetmanage?
You should definitely have a coding task when hiring programmers but it doesn't have to be very big or difficult.
The leetcode style tasks have nothing related to coding for the past 2 decades. That part is solved for a long time now. They ask for knowledge, which is a search away from everybody. I don’t know anybody, who knows those, and not only because of interviews. Also interviewers ask these, yet average code isn’t optimized at all. A simple question, like what’s your opinion of <anything> will tell you more than any leetcode question.
What happened with recommendation letters? Portfolio?
If I have 10+ years of proven experience with positive public recommendations written by high managers from F500 companies why should I be challenged with puzzles?
Talk an interview to figure out motivation and if we have the same vibe. Then hire me and decide a month later if I'm worth your money.
Trial period exists in labor law for a reason.
All of these are easily faked and/or not able to be shared. You think I can share code from FAANG?
Also, hiring is very expensive for those first few months at big tech. It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly - which is what would happen. Morale at faang is already hitting rock bottom due to the mandatory yearly+ 10%+ layoffs.
Everything could be faked. Leetcode interview as well.
Background check is a thing.
>> It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly
Also cannot agree, firing from the probation period does not affect morale. It is rather expected some people cannot make it through.
What is a background check going to tell you besides verifying their employment history
I have been running the exact same pair programming interview for ~100 candidates so far. Make a little exercise that is representative of your work, run everyone through it. Whatever you test for, that's what you should expect to get.
Interviews tuned properly for the position are almost always 95% talking with a decent trial/probation period. If they have the general credentials and can talk competently about the detail work, there is no benefit for either party doing these asinine code challenges.
The problems that spawn these leetcode barriers are WAY better solved at the source.
Prob 1: the interviewer doesn’t know shit about the actual role. I know it’s an uncommon opinion, but this should just not happen ever. I would gladly sit in on a speaking interview for my would-be coworkers, with the hiring manager, to check this. And the actual manager should be present and knowledgeable too. But 3 employees doing something is too much $ I guess.
Prob 2: credentials and high degrees are prolific, super mandatory, but also treated like they are meaningless. Experience is borderline ignored entirely. Worked with a software deeply for 10 years, but your cert is out of date? You won’t even get past the computerized HR filter. But because this is so openly stupid, companies tack on leetcode as another filter instead of rethinking the value of experience and relying on probation and bullshit detectors.
Excellent points. I just wonder about the 2-on-1 interviews. I think they tend to double-down on the one-sidedness of typical interviews.
It's not a group engineering meeting. Unless it's big-tech hiring of fungible worker drones, everyone in that meeting should be trying to get more signal about the others as individuals.
I've been the "1" in 2-on-1 three times recently, all for startups. For me, it's hard to think about the hard-thinking questions, and also be finding rapport and getting signal from two different people at once. I'd much rather spend twice as much of my time, to get each person 1-on-1, no additional cost to them.
Two of the recent 2-on-1 interviews were on videoconf, and, with the videoconf setup they chose, I couldn't even see one of the people most of the time.
The other interview was 3 people in tiny conference room/closet (the size of what used to be a one-person cubicle), for an hour, so it was especially stuffy and crowded with 3 people, and a great way to get Covid.
Besides more people complicating the situation, people tend to speak candidly with me 1-on-1, but are less likely to do that if their colleague is in the room or on the call.
Here's an intuition: Imagine you were a company interviewing startup candidates, and HR suggested saving time by you interviewing two candidates at once. It would be awful, and you wouldn't be able to get much read off of either (other than to tell if one or both were sharp-elbowed). So why do it 2-on-1 in the other direction, unless you're saying it's not important for a candidate to get signal about the company and colleagues?
Oh, I actually turned down a mostly great startup opportunity, basically over an n-on-1 interview.
I had a strong recommendation (halfway to hired, before they even met me, with a colleague's favorite ex-manager/mentor) to take over engineering and technical leadership, from a startup's technical CEO.
After I passed his interview, he had me do a 3-on-1 interview with the 3 engineering team members.
They all seemed a little awkward with the circumstances or format, and none opening up.
I passed the 3-on-1 from the CEO's perspective, and he gave me a written offer.
After I confirmed with him that one of the 3 existing engineers didn't want the role (I'd gotten a little leadership role vibe from him, despite 3-on-1), I asked to meet with at least one of the engineers 1-on-1, so I could get a better feel for the team.
The CEO pushed back hard on that, because what you see with them, is what you get.
We don't all get our intuitions the same way. Maybe the CEO could've gotten all the info he needed in a 3-on-1 videoconf meet&greet, including all the info I would get from 1-on-1. Or maybe I could've gotten info that he couldn't have, yet he seemed to be rejecting that possibility.
It might've been a great situation, but I ended up not taking it, arguably traceable to a low-info n-on-1 interview.
I mean, if the current Kafkaesque nightmare isn't working, then yes? You might as well read chicken entrails, at this point. At least then you'd get some diversity, if nothing else.
But the actual solution is to not let bean counters and bootcampers do the hiring, but we're a few too many programmer-generations away from anyone who actually knows what they're doing being left at most of these companies, so.
I recommend making furniture.
> The results of that meeting? The same from the previous promotion decisions; “it’s unfortunately a no. You don’t have enough impact.”
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 $$$.
All L4s are going to have supervision at Google, whether they “need” it or not. And most managers and tech leads aren’t going to just sit around twiddling their thumbs when no one “needs” supervision. Because most of them are bad at their jobs (I can count the number of good managers I’ve seen in 20 years on one hand).
I would go further and say that the entire system is designed to not promote people. It is there as a barrier to promotion and upward potential. The upward moves are saved completely for the in-crowd people. I'm sure at places like Google it is brutally difficult to move up the ladder at all.
Author here. I like statement. I think the biggest thing here is "not meeting this mark isn't a value statement"
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
> I had a lote of doubt about my own ability because I never got promoted.
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.
It's also important to understand the makeup of the existing team, and headcount the team has.
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.
The problems of lack of independence are rarely the kind of thing you decide in a big leveling meeting though: Someone working in near the project has to be providing the feedback regarding the employee needing more supervision. If that's the reason someone fails to uplevel, the manager and the dev lead are failing you, or outright saying something different for your packet than they say to your face.
Multiple denied promo applications. Warm, caring language but no attempt at retention on resignation. Other companies unsure of hiring candidate even after 10+ interviews.
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.
Author here. I do agree to an extent. But getting datpoints from the other people in the company at those higher positions is important. Asking what can you do to improve and what you can do to make better impact. For my situation, many people did agree that they agreed that I should be up leveled. Some people did say I could work on different projects but they have seen people get up leveled for way less. Some of it is luck as well.
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
Don’t listen to defeatist BS. If a candidate needs to grow, the response should be to give them small projects to lead and grow. A few university classes in missing subjects, coaching, etc. Not keep them in purgatory.
A growth mindset instead a fixed one, basically.
Yeah. I really feel for this guy. I'm at a bigco too and at my yoe, I would really like to be officially "senior".
But if I'm being honest with myself I have a bit of growing to do before I am there. The limiting factor is definitely me. I am improving every year but my peers are excellent.
I'm not "senior", but I'm enjoying my work, I'm making more than I ever have, and I'm improving as an IC.
I can't quite tell from OPs account if he really is the one being wronged in this situation. But I also think places like Google are not for everyone. At least from this post, I think they'll be happy with the new opportunity.
Have you worked at BigCo before? This was 1:1 my experience at a large company and within months they were asking for a +1 leveled boomerang.
You can't take denied promos at face value, honestly.
> 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.
> Do say: "I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer."
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".
There's no such thing as a "hands-on leading developer" on a "large-scale refactor" at Google, it'd be like saying you were the hands-on leading mechanic on building the 787 dreamliner.
I mean something like "spent a significant time as an individual contributor".
FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.
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!
Yeah, I get that.
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.
As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.
So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.
That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.
Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.
(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)
You look for impact, not how much it took time. There are people that work a lot, but have no real outcomes. Also this particular type of resume is popular because google has promoted this style
Impact can vary wildly between companies and circumstances given the same inputs however, so indexing on that can be misleading in interviews.
I've moved big revenue metrics with relatively simple projects. Anyone else could have done the same thing. And I was building on work that lots of product people and other engineers performed. That "impact" doesn't tell you anything about what I can bring to a new company with different systems and products.
I'm writing this without reading the comments first but oh boy, I wanted to punch a stone wall while I was reading this. I don't tolerate any company that has more than 3 interviews for a position, it's an automatic "no, sorry, I have better things to do with my life", and I tried, believe me, Red Hat had 6, Creative Assembly burnt me with 2 personal and 3 technical, all on-site on different dates (edit for peace of mind: these interviews were 13 years ago, it's fine...)
Maybe it's my own personal working culture, but when I get into a company I'm not thinking about levels, growth, stock options... I go there with a salary, a position and a willingness to help in whatever I can, once I'm not needed anymore (it's usually a combination of managerial direction changes, new hires, new objectives) that's my cue to help somewhere else where I may be needed or wanted. Am I that weird? I honestly don't understand this culture of quarter finance agent, half developer, quarter manager aspirant :/
This is an interesting contrast to the "don't become the machine" article.
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"
> 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.
And it shows through in the product. YouTube’s website is one of the 7 Wonders of UX Feces and they are climbing the ranks at a steady rate.
The difference is that the guy has moderate success, while don’t become the machine is a starving student who bought into Andrew Tate instagram kool-aid bullshit. Money is a hell of a drug once you’ve tasted it.
> In the software engineering world, we exist on a ladder. We call this ”Leveling”.
That bubble is not the world, I exist outside the ladder and I am legion.
I am also a renegade it seems. I just couldn’t institutionalize myself like that.
> That bubble is not the world
Hence the author's "In the software engineering world".
Nothing in author's write-up led me to think he doesn't understand that.
Yeah, no. Most companies do not have that exact hierarchy. Maybe at FAMGA etc, but most engineering jobs are not there.
Sure, not that exact hierarchy. But a hierarchy. At other places it might be Senior, Principal, Director, etc. at some places they’re given, at other places you fight for it. Variations of leveling.
levels.fyi makes it seem otherwise
https://foreignlegion.info/ranks/
I must say, life is a lot easier as a software engineer outside of Big Tech. It seems like a bit of a pressure cooker to me.
Unfortunately this shit is contagious so even non-Big-Tech companies eventually start to imitate it.
Google is a somewhat widely known place where promo is a huge problem, but the problem isn’t particular to Google. Generally companies will require you to repeatedly “prove” you are worth the additional compensation before agreeing to it. The friction varies, but the structural incentives are always there. Therefore if the goal is to maximize earnings, and assuming you are a high performer, it’s in your best interest to job hop once in a while.
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.
There's a third way. Think about maximizing salary to effort ratio instead of total salary. It might be the case that lower position has better ratio. Quiet quitting where people do bare minimum not to get fired is essentially this theory put into practice. You want to avoid a situation where you're rich but too stressed out to do anything with that money.
This is me, within limits of course. I work on 90% contract, having 10 weeks of paid vacation and sure as hell try to use that to the fullest.
Life is too short to focus on stuff that would lead to deep regrets later. I dont know about you guys but focusing all the time on money and career certainly feels like one, IT engineering is too successful to really have the need to behave so, so it becomes a choice.
I do focus on those but in short bursts and them coast the results for long time. Ie push through some boundary (lengthy acquiring of property, planning and realizing big reconstruction, naturalization process for me and family etc). I never grokked the 'completionist' mindset as a default one, its endless toil and unhappiness in big corporations.
I feel this is easier if you treat day jobs almost as a side hustle and have significant hobbies and life elsewhere. It’s more difficult if your career heavily overlaps with what you love doing (e.g. software), except the career comes with unwanted things like politics, promos, managing others, etc.
I think this pattern of "under promotion" is probably common is all highly competitive industries with large wealth corps. Think: Investment banking ("high finance"), oil & gas, big tech, law firms, consulting, etc. When I think about the sheer number of insanely talented people trying to get in, it conjures the World War Z image of zombies trying to get over the walls. With some perspective in my industry, I constantly remind myself: There are many, many more people outside my office that can do my job -- probably better than me. I need to constantly remind my employer why I am good. (Yes, it is exhausting.)
My new job title says "senior". It means nothing within the company except a 5% pay bracket or something, but I don't have to tell the next company that. I understand this is the mechanism by which titles result in money.
I would assume title inflation is a widely known phenomenon.
Optimising YouTube viewing time is a terrible goal to devote your life to in my opinion. I'm not sure if OP ever thought too deeply about what he was working on, but addicting people to a screen is not one I consider a value to society.
I can’t wrap my mind around those goals, because (IMHO) the number one thing that would improve viewership is entirety outside of YouTube’s hand: content quality. So the author can only ever move needles that are thrice removed (i.e.: improving backend tools -> creators have more time -> creators create better content) or are statistical coincidences (we made the buttons round -> viewership went up 0.2%).
The time spend in the app can be heavily gamed. Better algorithmic recommendations, pushing addictive features like shorts.
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction. If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it… implies a fear of making mistakes… The company with 13 rounds was fishing for a reason to say "no”
I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.
I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.
Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.
Youtube is getting problematic. I write this as someone who basically has some videos running in the background all the time, mostly just DJ music in the background.
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.
Set up jellyfin and tube archivist - I can't stand buffering
> First, searching for videos sucks. Yes, the first few results can be useful, then more and more crap shows up.
Heh, my solution to this is to use DuckDuckGo's Video search tab.
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber. Just yesterday I found myself opening a private window to watch a video with ads, rather than letting the algorithm know I was watching the video on my account. Even if I remove the video from my watch history, YouTube can’t help itself. You make a great point on stale content and the overall enshittification is becoming intolerable.
Pay a little extra for YouTube Premium Family and you can silo your interests to different Google profiles. I have work and home like this basically. Coding, AI, etc on one, cars, retro games on another. No ads.
> Pay a little extra
: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!
idk though, YouTube Premium is pretty good value if you're using it enough to care about recommendation hygiene. I remember the days everyone was begging to have the option to pay to skip ads. Well, YouTube did what we wanted, and now we're complaining about it for some reason.
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.
Wow. In my case the YT recommendations system works very well, only suggesting things similar to what I've already watched and liked.
I would never use YouTube in incognito mode or logged out... it's positively garish and loud with garbage.
>The problem of "doing more work and not getting compensated" is pretty well-known.
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.
Author here. I do want to mention that I don't exactly know the situation my manager was in, but he definitely did not make me feel dispensible personally. He and I had long conversations about life and work and our own lives and how the company will continue.
Some manager may seem this way, but my manager (and the other direct managers I had I YouTube) felt the most human and caring people I have met. They had goals to meet, but I also felt they really cared for me (and their other reports). So I really thank them for that.
Reading this I feel like I live on another planet.
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?
You do live in a different, underprivileged world. Many Google engineers have never not heard back from a job app.
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.
And half of that is taxed. The rest is spent on over-priced housing. And now you have no time/energy left to build anything of value. Congratulations.
Yeah unless you legitimately enjoy it, want the experience, or want to save up some money for a while - I don’t think it’s worth it (coming from someone that spent 10+ yrs at FAANG).
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.
Half of a big number is still a big number :). FAANG money can be life changing - retire 10-15 years "early" life changing.
If you want a serious answer:
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.
> are not driven by prestige or a big paycheck.
I'm not sure I agree with this one, I think a lot of people are drawn to software because of the money in the same way people are drawn to being a doctor or lawyer - the job itself overlaps with their innate skills and interests __enough__, and there's the promise of good pay on top of that. I think a lot of software engineers would be in other fields if it paid badly.
I've been at three FAANGs now and my experience has been that nobody really cares about your level for day-to-day work. The only times it has ever come up for me is when a) I was part of assembling a new team and we needed a mix of juniors and seniors or b) when some dangerous action like deploying during a holiday code freeze needed approval from an L9+ by policy, so you had to go find that person and justify it to them.
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.
Why did you bounce around faangs if you don’t mind me asking? Reading this site it seems… not uncommon, but I don’t understand why. Finding and starting a new job stinks haha.
I bounced from Amazon to Microsoft to Amazon to Microsoft to Facebook. Why? Because the grass is always greener on the other side. Amazon didn't pay enough, Microsoft was too boring, Amazon was too chaotic, and then Facebook paid much more. All bad decisions, but I only know that in hindsight. I'm not very smart.
Oh gosh, I didn’t mean to imply it was poor decision making, I was just curious. You’re a better person than me for putting up with the interview process. I absolutely refuse to grind leetcode problems. My TC at the moment is probably a lot less than what you’ve made though. Always tradeoffs.
No worries, I didn't sense any criticism. I've just become more critical of my own decisions, now that I have some perspective and it seems to me that most of what I did was poorly considered.
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.
Do you wish you’d have gained tenure at one company longer?
I did stay at Microsoft for a total of 15 years, but in retrospect it's the least interesting place to work. 5% coding, 95% overhead.
Of the places I've worked, none of them had anything where I can now say "I should have stayed there for longer." Amazon and Meta have obnoxious aggressive culture. Microsoft is a place where you can chill out and collect a paycheck and good health insurance. But very boring.
I also worked at some much smaller companies, but not for long. Maybe those are more interesting, but also less stable.
>Am I that much of an outlier that I need to get with the program?
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.
> this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible.
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.
Reality is that different resources have different impacts on an eng. org. Some individuals are eng. orgs onto themselves and can own a whole stack (breadth). Some are very specialized in areas that require deep expertise or experience (depth). Some are good engineers, but lack both breadth and depth of knowledge. Leveling let's you delineate comp bands accordingly.
The levels are a real thing, but "navigating the NDA minefield" is not, it's just something Googler's say to make themselves feel more special
I had never heard that expression until I read this article today, and I spent a very big chunk of my career at FAANGs. I think he just invented it. NDAs were never a problem for me when switching jobs either.
The article was interesting and much of it rang true, but not this detail.
Author here. I do feel incredibly luck in my position. This is a very specific perspective that I have, and I'm sorry that I may have seemed too entitled in this post. My whole goal was to point out to value yourself and don't let the company define you.
Leveling: it is kinda dystopian, but it's easier to define a ladder because it is something someone can work towards (like a skill tree). There are pros and cons, easily definable but dehumanizing. But it's something common in a lot of mid to large size tech companies.
I did leave this year, and that was after two and a half years of trying. It's a lot of trail and error. I did 7 in person interviews. Each session was 2-4 interviews each. And other than the first 3, I felt really confident in each one. But none but the last one I actually got a callback from. And countless other interviews before that that were online or not in-person. It's rough out there.
And NDA at YouTube is something that I was just super careful of. Google lawyers were something I didn't want to deal with later on and I heard some horror stories from other people that left before.
It may not be what is mainstream but this is what happened to me and I thought it might be informational and helpful for people who feel stuck or not as valued. I hope people feel valued at work, at the least.
I hope your search gets better this year! And merry Christmas!
> 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).
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.
At Amazon, level is public. Microsoft, only the title (Senior etc) is visible not the precise level is visible is my impression. At Google, it can be public but apparently can also be hidden. At Facebook it's always hidden.
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 was leaving because I had outgrown the pot I was planted in
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.
Author here. I debated this, but the state of Google and YouTube together and certain things internally led me to just look for external opportunities.
Probably would've been less stressful. Lol.
Did you get a pay rise moving externally? One very negative thing I have found in my career: Exactly zero internal moves come with a pay rise, but nearly all external moves come with a pay rise. The choice is easy for me.
I don't mean this to be a callout, but what do you mean you led teams as an L4? Even if you were unofficially leading them, you get caught in the politics trap of not being able to claim any credit for having done so, because that means the higher levels in the workstream weren't doing their jobs, and you can't write that down or say it outloud. This is a problem in every hierarchical organization, and learning how to navigate it is unfortunately a part of the leveling process in itself when you are starting from a lower level versus being hired into a higher one.
I wonder why 7 of your comments have been killed (dead)
maybe it's the new HN account or something?
(submitter) Maybe. I have emailed the moderators to see if the comments can be restored.
They were good comments, I was able to read them (barely) since I have dead comments enabled. Thanks for investing the time.
> Your level dictates your salary, your stock grants, and most importantly, the scope of problems you are allowed to solve. I found myself in a situation common to many engineers at large organizations. I was operating at a “Senior” or “Staff" level (...) but my official title and compensation were stuck at just above junior level.
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.
To be fair, if you're a higher level you're more likely to be tasked with problems that have a wider scope, as opposed to having to actively seek them out and balance them against day to day work.
When I read about the culture at Google, and similarly YouTube, I am constantly reminded of how (and probably why) their products have stagnated/gotten worse over time despite having top engineers. I believe Google has the talent to build anything in their wildest dreams. So why do their products suck? YouTube sucks from the user POV, Google classroom sucks, the user experience in their office suite leaves a tremendous amount to be desired for even a basic user like me, Android never improves, their voice recognition and assistant are trash. There's so much room for competition, I wonder where it is? What are they spending their money and talent on (besides AI)? I feel like it must primarily be on reliability, speed, and delivering more ads.
This is why it's honestly not worth working that hard. Work hard enough to get noticed, spend the rest of the time making sure the right people know what you're doing. After a certain point it just doesn't matter anymore. The company has quarterlies to hit, and they aren't going to budge from whatever they have allowed for salary. And they're going to take the money they won't pay you and put it in an exec bonus package.
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.
i would like to push back a bit on this and say, it is worth working hard, but i would argue a lot of programmers get hindered by the illusion that programming is important, or even delivering results. unfortunately in software this is exacerbated by the very real world-wide impact that programming actually does have, but: it will always be subjugated by the most important job...
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.
> quitting a mag7 like google is objectively a step down whichever way you slice it.
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?
If you look at my comment again you'll see I said "work hard enough to get noticed... And make sure the right people know". I'm saying the same thing you are. You also don't have to be a Tyrion Lanister level political manipulator to get ahead. You mostly just have to make sure a few key people are aware of you and like you.
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.
Do you have a book recommendation for learning the most important that is politics?
> From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability
He didn’t have to care that deeply. Alphabet expected from him L4 work. He got paid as a L4. It’s just fair that he also delivered L4 work and spent his effort on something more useful
>At one prominent tech company, I underwent 13 separate interviews for a single role.
In what insane world does this make any amount of sense?
I went through a loop at Meta that was probably 10-11 rounds. I would have done 100. The compensation is truly life changing and the engineering problems were world-class.
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.
Meta is truly changing the lives of millions and millions of people for the worse.
Author here. Very good point. I am in a lucky position for retrospective, but I was also very much in the mood of "I'll take what i can get" lol
That's a huge privilege; most people don't have enough time for that
It really doesn't make much sense. The article was actually insightful on this point, or at least this matches my experience:
> 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 did 13 interviews in 2 days at Microsoft Research (in 1998). I did not get the job.
I see that as a manifestation of Buridan's Ass --- when they're very indecisive about it, they will naturally try to measure more.
In a world where clacking keyboard gets you 500k salary.
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It really sucks to feel so undervalued. I have been working with WITCH company and the entire promotion leveling is based on favoritism. With this 90 days of Notice Period, it is nearly impossible to get through even first round of interview. Every day is a struggle to prove yourself to the handicapped managers and self doubt whether you are even worth something to leave this job and try something else. 10 years and each day is a painful struggle.
> Hunting for a job is a full-time occupation. Doing so while maintaining high performance at a demanding job like YouTube is a recipe for cognitive fracture.
You don't need to maintain it that high, just enough not to get fired within the expected time to find a new one?
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction.
Indeed, but since you understand it, you also don't have to waste your time 13 times?
Levels in big tech are just a way to keep you motivated. You'll work harder to get a promo.
In the end it doesn't matter, you'll make more money by either leaving or getting a retention offer.
Two questions:
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?
Re. (1): It can really depend on what they did before and during school. While in school, one could have real internships, real personal projects, open-source contributions, working for the university, contract gigs, etc.
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.
Author here. I worked at internships and smaller contracts in HS and college. But I've been coding since the start of highschool with coding competitions and jobs that helped my neighbors and my grandparents. Even in retrospect, even though they were small or not as full time as what I did now, I would still count them as learning career experience
And I have been hired somewhere else. I was really close just to quit early and go to contract work. But I got really lucky with an offer a few months ago. If someone's feels like they want to quit, definitely investigate the amount of work it will take to be self employed. It's a lot, but understanding your own skills and being able to market that is a great ability to learn!
My man, if some Joe went as a salesman with 20 years of experience because every summer he sold some lemonade since he was 5, people would, well, at the very best pat one with “good for you, buddy, good for you.”
Then again, “fake it till you make it” is known to work too, so you do you. Definitely wouldn’t judge you in this economy to employ every trick in the book.
Yet, still a trick
Re 2), this reminds me of those situations where people are given the opportunity to resign rather than being fired. They get to save face on their next job interview, but it does the next hiring company a disservice. It might be something that comes up later in the hiring process, but nothing that would be identifiable at the start of that process
I used to related with what the OP says and if he’s under 35 makes sense to jump to another adventure.
Anyways, a friend of mine told me the complete opposite than the OP after not being selected to a promotion 2x: He stayed competitive enough to the market in case of any issue, but at the same time he slightly moving to the “Dead Sea” existence where the tenure created a small co-dependence between himself and its employer.
His employer knows that he’s working at a discount in comparison to offshoring his job, but at the same time even being a L4 like can enjoy a lot of free time and agency to know when and where to throttle his productivity.
I guess lying on your linkedin "senior swe" is also helpful for getting a staff engineer position?
Google submits your title and salary info to theworknumber, I would advise against this (and lying in general).
I never knew this existed. It's insane how much data this service collects, and that the data is available for sale just like that. What a nightmare.
Author here. They do, even most recruiters require this before submitting for some of these jobs. Most hiring managers also filter that out by behavioral interviews and seeing how you handle team work, large scale work, and discussion upwards and downwards. Especially the higher you go, the harder it is to lie to get through.
I'm in a similar situation but I also have a direct report who is clearly displeased at the lack of leveling available to us. All I can do is empathize with them.
Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?
The levels are very similar to all those hierarchy used in big corporations outside of the tech. Classic selection and grooming techniques. We all get to decide if we want to play that game or not.
Author here. I'm touched by whoever posted this here. I hope people can read this and feel empowered to value themselves and try to make the impact they feel like they can.
Happy holidays everyone! ♥
Currently in a similar situation. Stuck at L5 and failed the L6 transition due to: "The trajectory is good, but there is not enough evidence showing that you are consistently performing at L6".
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
Yes, you're out earning most SWEs, certainly almost all in Europe. Congrats. I'd be optimizing for a lack of stress and working on interesting things, but also my personal life to bring progression and accomplishment.
I really don't feel it's that unique that it took a while to quit. A big reason these cultures are so popular is because a lot of of the time people don't quit right away and you can keep extracting work above their pay grade until they do. Even if you have some churn, you can keep getting that kind of work for cheap as long as you have a good supply of new hires.
What matters is being (1) happy with your job (2) having an excellent life-work balance and (3) fair or better compensation. The rest is just fuel to the ego and it means nothing.
If you want to drive projects, do it at your own free time.
You are just a liability to the investors and that's why everyone actually wants AI
> And I had to highlight the incredibly talented team I worked with and the amazing managers that taught me so much.
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.
Find a smaller company that has managers that came from a tech background that are still hands-on-keyboard.
They have both the time and experience to help mentor.
To the author: was there an open process to move to another role within your previous company? That could be another path to finding a better environment where one could grow in salary and responsibility?
I learnt a long time ago that there is no such thing as loyalty with regards to work and that if you want to get the most compensation for what you do you need keep moving until you find the place where you happy with the compensation and equally the culture.
However things will change, either at home or at work so you need to balance those out.
When I started out I had this misplaced sense of loyalty to my first job I liked and it really held me back, they paid really low wages but for some reason I felt lucky to work there.
I changed my mindset and realised I’m selling my time to them so I might as well get the best return on my time in both compensation and enjoyment.
The bottom line is you don’t have to except poor pay, bad culture and boring work. You’re in control of your life.
EDIT
Also don’t be scared to ask for a pay rise or bonus. I make a point of doing it at each review and I check its progress in most one to ones. At the end of the day its your responsibility to get paid, you’re employer not matter how good they are us always going to try and save on opex, do you need to take ownership and make sure you’re getting paid what makes you happy.
Be careful of "Being Glue"
https://www.noidea.dog/glue
> If you're a white or Asian dude, everyone assumes you're good at coding, just by default. You could have graduated yesterday with a degree in law, and people assume you can code
Close tab
Youtube is very tough for promo- I wouldn’t recommend it
Author here. You're telling me! :)
> If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy [...] the companies with 5 to 8 rounds had the clearest internal culture
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.
So did the author ever achieve the job change? It doesn’t come to that conclusion.
The article title is actually "How I Left YouTube".
Maybe someone could update it?
IIRC HN typically removes the "How" from article titles like these, presumably to avoid clickbait titles.
Love how he’s critical of the 13-interview hiring process despite having done all 13 of those interviews.
“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.
You manage to live a life where if you don't like something, you can just avoid it?
Yes. Parameters: not interested in status/money/clout, rich in happiness/love from family, european.
Yes. With some limitations. This is true for everyone though.
13 interviews suggests he was interviewing for multiple roles within the same company; in which case it's not that shocking. In many places every team runs their own interviews.
Lord I would hope so lol
Even more so for such a great engineer that in the words of his colleagues is "indispensable for the company".
If you're such a rockstar you can probably get shortened loops in good companies through referrals
I’ve never seen someone skip the interview process or get it shortened through a referral. At best it will move your resume to the top of the big pile, which is very helpful, but I don’t think they help much more than that.
I haven't personally seen it either, but there are many commentors on HN (it comes up every time there is a thread about interviewing) that describe precisely that.
Do you also pay 500k?
If we do, nobody told me.
I worked at Google.
I’ve never worked at a more soul crushing company. The bureaucracy is worse than the government. There are too many embedded multi-millionaires with 15+ years tenure that don’t give a shit and don’t even respond to buganizer tickets.
If you come across a resume from anyone with more than 5 years at Google throw it away. It means they thrive in an environment where nothing gets done.
Google is a company which spies on its users, and manipulates search results and recommendations against user interests to further external and internal-corporate interests. This manipulation happens specifically on YouTube. On that platform it also executed the "adpocalypse" in 2017, and other measures.
The intrepid author, however, has not a word to say about any of that. "I just work(ed) here" is the implicit statement. He's preoccupied with his leveling and his personal advancement.
Is that typical of Google software engineers? I wonder.
Why does OP's linkedin say Senior then?
Is this why YouTube kinda sucks now?
> Gemini made - “Telling my manager I’m quitting and both of us are upset about it"
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 read the title and thought it would be about migrating from youtube to something self hosted/self made. Oh well :) Good luck in your future endeavors or sorry about your "ai" layoff, whichever applies.
I thought same and wonder what other platform one can migrate to and have the same kind of audience reach.
And??? Where did you go? Did you get L5/L6? Or did you just leave and not get another job? What a wild article to have the interviews so prominently featured but not have a conclusion.
Yea I was also looking for this info. But his Linkedin says he is still at Google. So is this some weird cliffhanger now?
People in my experience usually don’t post about their new employer until they’re settled in for one or two months in order to not bad mouth a new employer which didn’t work out as expected.
The most annoying thing in this world is the titles specially in tech industry.
...did you find a new job before leaving YT?
Author here. I did! :)
But I was really about to quit with a job lined up. I gave myself to the end of 2025 to get a new job. I had savings enough to hold me off, but it was one of those things where I was ready to even do freelance or contract. Putting more time in searching and portfolios. I'd rather get more time making code that was publicly available on GitHub to show my prowness than just talking about it to people.
And I had an incredible support system from my partner. I wouldn't feel comfortable taking this leap without her. :)
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You’re thinking about the “Professional Engineer” title or some variant thereof.
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.
Strange hill.
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.
Now do every other common term in software engineering.
Someone once told me they built a trampoline and I show up in their backyard and there’s nothing.
I'm sorry, but why did the author not mark this post as AI generated? It's clear from many different phrasings that this was written with an LLM. And no, I won't point out any particular spot, but I'm sure my fellow commenters will know what I am talking about.
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!
Thank you for saying this. I found it to be heavily assisted by LLM too and commented as well. I ended up receiving too many downvotes though.
Seems like a warm reboot for a career coach hustle
Expect a mailing list subscription with courses coming soon
Tried to read through the article, but couldn't finish. I felt this writing heavily alluded to a ChatGPT generated response. Too many punchlines and paragraph breaks.
Some version of this comment shows up in just about every HN comment thread on a blog post. It must be LLM-generated.
His criticism is valid. Not his fault most blog posts are AI slop these days.
Overzealous pattern matching is not criticism.
Ok, why can I not just read the prompt that went in? Why do I need to read a verbosified version of it? What's the point?
Why must you insist it's LLM-generated based on formatting and feel? What if this is just how the author writes? This is what I mean by overzealous pattern matching.
It does look LLM-assisted, but I'm fairly sure the experiences shared are genuine.
The word genuine is taking on a lot of responsibility in this line of reasoning.
If paragraph breaks are a sign of LLM slop now, then I’m in trouble. The ones in my blog posts are rarely longer than 2 sentences and they are all handcrafted.
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
Not that alone. But the way sentences are formed, add it with those frequent pauses, punchlines that are punchy for the sake of it, and that last AI generated image --- all point at an inorganic article. I was just pointing it out, I do not understand the downvotes for it.
Unfortunately you missed the cherry-on-the-top AI generated image of an engineer and her manager mourning the end together.
>The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.
>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.
Author here. At the new job and yes, context switching has helped me a lot! Lol
We geeks often like to go deep, and engineers who persist with shallow understanding of tech hit limits. But as you get more responsibility, getting quickly oriented to project/task/business stuff is extremely valuable. And tbh, doing the same for tech topics is valuable but harder to do.