> 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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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 in a shark workplace 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.
> 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.
I'm a bit lost about the part where he told his manager that's he's leaving and he was "anticipating a counter-offer" but he "was met with soft and understanding empathy" and the manager "still was incredibly supportive while I said I was leaving". It's like a scene from a a comedy movie where one thinks his boss will crawl on his feet begging him to stay but instead he's like "Yeah, sure, good luck. Bye." and in a week he doesn't even remember his name xD Is there something similar to "stockholm syndrome" but regarding employees that think managers care about them on a personal level? You know, "we're not a company but a family!" bullshit stuff. Just because someone pretends to care about you doesn't mean they actually do, especially on a manager position - I can understand a junior falling for it but someone that spent several years in a corporation... yikes
>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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The articles author lives in a made-up world. You never are an Engineer if you are not registered with your (U.S.) states' board, let alone graduated with an actual engineering degree. Oh, and by the way, architecting is not a word either; Architecture is another licensed profession.
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.
> 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.
+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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It took me a long time to realize this.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
https://foreignlegion.info/ranks/
I am also a renegade it seems. I just couldn’t institutionalize myself like that.
> 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.
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.
>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 in a shark workplace 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.
I guess lying on your linkedin "senior swe" is also helpful for getting a staff engineer position?
> 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.
I'm a bit lost about the part where he told his manager that's he's leaving and he was "anticipating a counter-offer" but he "was met with soft and understanding empathy" and the manager "still was incredibly supportive while I said I was leaving". It's like a scene from a a comedy movie where one thinks his boss will crawl on his feet begging him to stay but instead he's like "Yeah, sure, good luck. Bye." and in a week he doesn't even remember his name xD Is there something similar to "stockholm syndrome" but regarding employees that think managers care about them on a personal level? You know, "we're not a company but a family!" bullshit stuff. Just because someone pretends to care about you doesn't mean they actually do, especially on a manager position - I can understand a junior falling for it but someone that spent several years in a corporation... yikes
>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.
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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
Youtube is very tough for promo- I wouldn’t recommend it
> 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".
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You manage to live a life where if you don't like something, you can just avoid it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The articles author lives in a made-up world. You never are an Engineer if you are not registered with your (U.S.) states' board, let alone graduated with an actual engineering degree. Oh, and by the way, architecting is not a word either; Architecture is another licensed profession.
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.