> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.

6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.

It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

> it seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.

> soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers

The saddest part about the ladder is that it's not even fun. In academia, our ladder has fun names, and on each level you get to dress up in a different outfit that gets more elaborate the higher you climb on the ladder, which is basically the driving concept behind every MMO ever made, so that's cool. The whole promotion culminates in a parade and a blessing from the church elders, I mean University leadership.

At Google, they creatively dubbed the levels "L1-L10", and there's no outfit or parades. I assume they throw you a party or something at least? With cake?

Sure, the art faculties have the best costumes, but where I come from there was making vows in LATIN how cool is that (you needn't have to understand latin, just recite the vows is all fine)

jk

If you need to ask, promo parties were suspended with the lockdown, but I guess they are gonna come back in style

It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.

Large corporations?

Pick any company on the Fortune 500 and you’ll see the same behavior to climb the “ladder”. A small corporation could be less than 1000 or so people and might not have that culture as much.

I worked at a Fortune 500 and the ladder was floating in a mist of opaque fog, with inexplicably shifting rungs.

Upside was that many of us just said screw it and focused on the work. Downside was that many said screw it and went to other companies where they could at least grok the ladder.

Google only has a couple 100k employees at most. Other organizations dwarf that.

Infinite marathon

> 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years.

Can you explain how this gets them promos? I feel like a promo-focused culture would result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

> result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

We didn't create our own, but we did migrate our codebase to a new server-side rendering framework twice in my time there.

Also, nobody on our team ever got promoted.

>creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless

at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.

Those rendering frameworks are being written as well, for no other reason than promo

Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way.

Here's a blog post explaining their approach:

https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s...

Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone building up a software engineering workplace.

“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote”

I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to join?”

In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?

Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO.

You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere.

There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.

The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year.

I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together.

And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.

> The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level.

This is an awful idea.

Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team. Why would any high performer want to anchor themselves to lower performing team members? That is a surefire way to get a lower bonus. Why would I volunteer to take on a crummy or particularly hard task when I can just hope someone else does it and I reap the rewards?

> I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together.

Peoples' performance changes for every reason under the sun from "I decided to stay out late and drink on a Wednesday" to "my boss is an asshole" to "I just don't feel like working today". Personally, I want control over my own destiny and my own bonus. I don't want to feel obligated to push myself harder for someone else's bonus. And just the same, I don't want someone else's shortcomings to tank my bonus.

The actual answer here is to make sure that your review process accounts for how individuals impact the group dynamic.

> And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.

This is a super ignorant take.

Any person who has a family and works to support them wants to provide the best they can for their family. That's not greed. Kids are fucking expensive by themselves, let alone trying to send them to college.

>Why would I volunteer to take on a crummy or particularly hard task when I can just hope someone else does it and I reap the rewards?

When you are on a team that is committed to the success of a project or a real thing in the world, rather than hoping for a bonus, you help everyone on the team at each step of the process. If you enjoy the work you are doing, you'll enjoy the hard tasks; even the tedious tasks take on a certain type of satisfaction in a good job.

A team where people are sitting around for others to take action is not a good team or a good job. I encourage you to raise your standards.

>Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team.

I don't care how many rockstars are on a team, I care if the team is transforming the world into a better place, is helping the company and humanity make the transition to "everything is software and networked" a thrilling transition. If someone is slower mentally but has a vision of a better world that the team is making happen, then they will probably move the team towards delivering on that vision than some smart but Blind obsessed person that wants the "FIRE" crap. Also, valuing money over all means your team will fall into traps like accounting irregularities more easily - lacking a sense of values outside of economic gain means the team will fall into things like the Enron mess or https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2005/03/22/t... or the various shady ad selling schemes or privacy selling schemes so common these days.

I've worked with teams where most people love the work and love the outcome of the work on the world, and I've worked where people are beset with visions of becoming some sort of rich software engineering lord, and it's a lot more fun in the former case.

People that want families and is supporting them are not doing software only for a princely salary. The thing that's awesome about a software career and families is that the demand for engineers means you can afford to insist on the flexibility and time-off needed by the family, and still get a livable salary.

The best way for someone who wants to be a rockstar to win is by anchoring themselves to a low-performing team. If pay is based on relative performance, then you should find the lowest performing coworkers you can.

I wouldn't inherently mind explicitly tieing individual performance to (small) team level performance. In practice this often happens when management looks at performance holistically anyway.

> I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. ---

I think it is primarily people who find a strong sense of identity in work and careers that think this way. For many, their passions lie outside of work and they do indeed want to maximize their value and time so that they can focus on things they care about.

So to say filtering out "greedy people" is quite demeaning IMO.

I don't mean the "slackers" that want to go home at a reasonable time and hike the Appalachian trail or rescue lost mountain climbers or whatever, I mean the ambitious types that worry if they are getting 185K USD instead of 205K USD rather than on making the digital transformation a really cool thing for humanity, and making products that they are proud to try to explain to their families.

As I feel the "digital transformation" is mostly handwaving BS, indeed it takes that increment of compensation (as much as possible!) not to perseverate on the worthlessness of that buzzword. I'm in the midst of changing jobs right now because I'd rather devote my efforts to the honorable (IMHO) concrete instead of being the DT advocate (one of the parts of my current job).

If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.

Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.

While I see your point, I'd argue with "there's no benefit to doing better."

People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.

I would expect the majority of people are more motivated by having some skin in the game than they are by the rewards of doing the work itself. I get great joy out of making my clients happy and solving hard problems (I enjoy rabbit holes), but even I get frustrated when there's no real advancement (financial or otherwise) for doing a better job.

For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how they feel about the system. It may well be that this appeals more to mid-career people with families and other life to worry about.

But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture interviews, and has an interesting product space where you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this combination would be appealing to early-career people, especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or aren't set on acquiring that kind of résumé.

They mention this potential downside explicitly in the blog post. It sounds like they actually believe this is a good thing as it signals to junior employees that would need alot of support that they cannot provide it:

> The way we’ve set up our levels, people in the early stages of their careers can get bigger titles and raises more quickly at other orgs than they can at Daily. This will likely be a deterrent to some early-stage candidates, but we are ok with that for now. While we are excited to bring in early-career people once we have the structure to support them, we aren’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a while. We don’t want to make the mistake of hiring high-potential people we then under-serve, especially if they’re from groups typically excluded from tech.

> In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?

Why do you think you need the top 40%?

Japan traditionally has that “getting promoted after X years” approach.

At scale it encourages coasting and not doing much until your manager moves on for whatever reason and you have a window into moving up. It also means the Peter principle is in competition with getting promoted while not being very competent.

I think there are specific fields and job where it’s a decent approach, but not at scale and not with salaries tied to promotions.

This is why promo culture is impossible to remove at bigger companies. Perks of promotion (higher salary, title, status) far outweighs just trying to do right by customers.

Whereas at early-stage startups, the only way to really make a lot of money is to grow the pie, which usually involves serving customers better.

Now that there are so many well-funded startups (https://topstartups.io/) there are more paths to escape the promo BS and still make a great living

Any promo process with any randomness (especially a promo process that changes over time as upper management changes) is effectively a stochastic version of "promo after N years after not being fired." I don't worry much about promos, but still randomly get promos because the stuff I found important for a few years was also nicely slotted into the promo standards at the time. And the obsession on titles and such book-cover-like triva does seem to get worse the more they try to systematize the process. When it's clearly equivalent to rolling dice, people worry less about it. The more rigorous they make the process and the more they have panels and packets and so on, the more people start introducing each other with their title. My first ten years in software, no one cared about titles at all unless you met with a non-engineering org and met dumb people with an exalted titles (in which case you felt bad; titles only serve to harm morale, they never improve it). The last ten years, people act like becoming Senior Principal Staff Engineer is like becoming a different sort of human. It does correlate with more pay, so it's hard to say it's completely trivial, but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever, it's less important to happiness than fulfilling work, good co-workers, flexibility to meet your family or parenting obligations, autonomy over your work, and so on. One imagines one gets more autonomy by having a grander title, but really you get autonomy by just exercising the autonomy you have by being in control of the scarce and valuable resource of being able to create and improve software systems. If what you find important is valued by the organization you work in, then it will work out that people trust you, no matter the levels.

> but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever

That's probably where Bay Area housing inflation has an effect - houses that used to be affordable to "normal" engineers are now only affordable to staff engineers. Tech companies are hiring more and more people scrambling for a fixed supply of housing. Of course it's dystopian!

I'm a staff engineer at one of FAANG and I cannot afford a house in bay area in 2022 (only considering prices and not the recent rate hikes). It's Sr Staff+ in bay area now for affording a decently sized house in a decent neighborhood that isn't too far from work centers like MV, SV and SF.

Yes, and it doesn't stop there:

L3: $192,064

L4: $268,758

L5: $358,423

L6: $502,465 (!)

https://www.levels.fyi/

Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot more, like over 20x more!?!

Please tell me how I can make $10M per year (20 x $502k) And I’ll quit my job right now.

I wrote a program which did months of coding in hours.

Is this juvenile? https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ud3vhp/pro...

A bit of this helps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3hAnAnJwyU

Found startup, get acquihired in a year for $10M. There's risk involved, but there are certainly people who have managed to do this.

There's a number of other ways of varying risk/time/shadiness tradeoffs. Start VC fund, have $1B exit, cash out $70M carry in 7 years. Start hedge fund, raise $300M, earn 12% returns for 7 years, cash out $70M carry on $360M profits. Find a DeFi exploit, hack Ethereum, earn $300M in a 10 seconds, hope the Feds don't catch you. Lever up on real estate, put 3.5% down on 100 $300K properties, turn $1M into $20M as they've gone up to $500K over the past year.

The worst case when you fail to get promoted is still making salary at the current levels.

The worst case when you fail at a start up is years of lost time, money and health. And starting way behind others, should you(now that you are out of money, wouldn't you?) start a a job again.

The term mediocre is loosely used there, pretty much every one who starts a company fails, and thereby ends up being mediocre compared to a person working a job.

Salaried jobs have a better path to financial success than a start up, for nearly all the people.

Better than $500K/year plus best-in-class benefits and access to a large number of very bright people? How, exactly, did you manage this?

You might be forgetting self-employment tax there?

He's talking about making 10 million a year and you think the issue is he forgot the 8k or so of self employment FICA taxes?

I've worked in UK tax havens.

At the end of 2008 I had to add 3 more zero's so a trader could be paid their bonus.

Well he also added one too many zeroes, but that's just a surface level problem.

You are right. Till the time you have promotions tied with significant pay bump, you will have people working their a* off for promos and trying to do all it takes to satisfy criteria.

>I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Though, If you do this you will have a culture where people are scared all the time and don't feel any job security.

Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)?

Some L4s can make more than L6s.

What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected.

What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

>What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

At a company like Facebook, the difference between L4 and L6 is over $100k in salary, and $80k in stock (difference in 4 year refresh grant of $325k). $180k a year difference isn't almost nothing.

IIUC, there's a >$100k range in TC (grants, bonus, salary) - WITHOUT appreciation for L4s. It's >$150k range in TC for L6s.

If there's a ~$180k difference between the average L6 and the average L4, and the bands are that wide - you have a lot of L4s making more than L6s.

If an L4 is "Exceeding Expectations" enough to get huge grants and bonuses, and an L4 is "Needing Improvement" enough to get terrible grants and bonuses... Why is the L4 an L4 and the L6 an L6?

Additionally, everyone has different (with big swings) of how much of their compensation comes from stock vs salary & bonus. When appreciation comes into play - this has large implications.

Additionally, people working between 2-4 years often make substantially more money than anyone else at the company in their current level.

Not if the L4 started 3-4 years before the L6. Their original RSU grant might have been substantially more than they are handing out due to price appreciation, and thus their TC is much higher. This happened to hilarious effect at Amazon, where I had some coworkers that were receiving insane comp and were Sr, but not PE level. Originally they got a grant that was worth 500-600k that went up 5x.

That's not L4 vs L6, that's start in 2015 vs 2108 or whatever.

price hasnt appreciated at meta lol

Because you get less of an annual raise at the high end of the bands. This means if you stay at the same level you drift to the center of the band. It's better to be a the lower end of a band so the model causes you to drift up.