Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles

Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by oofta-boofta on Monday March 06, 2023 @09:31PM (#35050806)

This just reinforces what I've been saying for years: seeking promotion is for chumps.

You'll make far more money and advance far quicker from job-hopping between companies than you will trying to seek internal promotion.

Google, and pretty much big tech as a whole, is completely aimless at this point and has no real plan to provide new value to customers. They just jump from shiny thing to shiny new thing. Big tech has only been able to maintain it's recent dominance through monopolistic practices, and now they've mismanaged themselves into decline. Good.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by ChatGTP on Monday March 06, 2023 @09:40PM (#35050864)

I guess the new hope is they can automate everyone out of work to save money on labor, that seems to be the new growth path...

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by jnwatson on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:38PM (#35051241)

It isn't easy to get senior FAANG compensation at other companies.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by Bajeezus on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:55PM (#35051349)

That was true 5+ years ago, but these days I can easily name 20+ companies that pay roughly the same or more at the senior level.

Half your compensation at FAANG is name recognition for your resume.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by roflyear on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:00AM (#35051762)

List them!

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by Panini_Jones on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:48AM (#35052028)

E5/L5 compensation is relatively similar across the board for normal performers ($350k-$450k). Once you get into the E7+ compensation levels, then you start to notice a real differences.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by roflyear on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:53PM (#35058568)

I'd like a list of companies with $350k+ comp please ...

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by Panini_Jones on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @06:17PM (#35062759)

Check out levels.fyi or candor.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by jnwatson on Saturday March 11, 2023 @10:42PM (#35116357)

I just did. There was exactly one other company that paid like a FAANG for staff engineer in my non-SV location and it was another FAANG.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by rat9988 on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @05:29AM (#35053757)

Name the 20+ companies that have faang level compensation.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by pjmlp on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @02:06AM (#35052472)

In the other hand, the only way to avoid forced promotion is mostly to leave and start afresh somewhere else.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by 8n4vidtmkvmk on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @03:16AM (#35052907)

Riggght? Every couple months my managers start harassing me about going for promo. Chill out. I just want to write code. The higher L I am, the more pointless meetings I have to endure and the less code I can write. Do you not want people that actually get things done, competently? Or do you want to save all the coding for the L3s so we can really double down on that tech debt?

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by lisasays on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:19AM (#35055597)

Do you want to save all the coding for the L3s so we can really double down on that tech debt?

If you view your colleagues so disdainfully - why (other than comp) are you still working there?

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by mhss on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @06:30PM (#35062918)

FWIW. I don't read this as disdain, just stating the fact that less experienced people make more mistakes or may have less experience avoiding tech debt. It's hyperbole of course (I hope) because L4/L5s should be reviewing that code, but the point I believe is that coding is sometimes too quickly removed as a valuable activity for L5s and above.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by lisasays on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @08:53PM (#35064172)

Sounds like an attempt at spin, frankly.

The commenter wasn't saying that the L3s "may have less experience avoiding tech debt"; but that they are, by default, to be viewed as creators of technical debt.

Which I guess we all are, at the end of the day. Still there's a snarky edge to the wording in that comment that I find hard to get past.

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by saurik on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:14AM (#35065837)

Maybe it is really important to know precisely what an "L3" is, and since I've never worked for whatever company this is I'm unsure; but, FWIW, as someone who was just casually reading the comment, it didn't really come off as snarky in that sense, as if you are forcing all the strongest coders to get promoted then by definition the people who are lower in the org chart are weaker coders, at which point the comment just "made sense" and didn't seem at all to offer actual "disdain" towards anyone except the promotion system (which maybe should itself be a reason to quit, but hopefully they are being paid well).

That said, I guess my explanation for the phenomenon--as someone outside such systems--is that in fact these organizations want weaker people at the bottom doing the grunt work as they are easier to control: they are all about figuring out how to build systems out of interchangeable cogs, under the premise that if you do enough build engineering then you can take almost any competent coder and get at least some contribution out of them (even if you end up needing ten times as many employees as a tradeoff).

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Re:Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promot... by lisasays on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:45PM (#35073080)

I like your theory, which seems to explain a lot of things (like why I'm not attracted to such organizations, for example). Especially the last part:

In fact these organizations want weaker people at the bottom doing the grunt work as they are easier to control: They are all about figuring out how to build systems out of interchangeable cogs, under the premise that if you do enough build engineering then you can take almost any competent coder and get at least some contribution out of them (even if you end up needing ten times as many employees as a tradeoff).

Corollary being: if the work itself is structured so that much of it is viewed as "grunt work" - then by definition, the people stuck doing it (L3s in this case) are viewed disdainfully.

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