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Comment by southphillyman | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I hear a lot of stories of people being down leveled but it sounds like some companies have strict bands related to YOE. L4 appears to be mid level and I guess 7 yrs if on the upper limits of that but you'd think they'd give you the option of being down leveled or not to get your foot in the door.

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> "it sounds like some companies have strict bands related to YOE"

I don't see how this could be legal, even in an employer-friendly a nation as the U.S.

Sure, there are some outlier candidates who enter the field later in life as a second career. But for the overwhelming majority of candidates, "years of experience" is a very thin proxy for "age". I can understand requiring a minimum YOE, but there's no reasonable justification for a maximum.

Farther up the page is a comment that rings true to me: companies who have a surplus of applicants are prone to rationally bias their hiring practice to avoid making poor hires even at the risk of rejecting strong candidates.

Just because someone with many years of experience levels lower than typical doesn’t make them a bad person or even a bad hire. But it does make them a more risky candidate to hire (more likely to be "middle of the pack"; less likely to be "undiscovered superstar"), and so some companies choose to pass.

(I’m arguing that this is rational, not that it’s right, fair, or morally sound.)

Well, I'd argue it still isn't rational given that the testing done during the interview is usually not telling much about the candidates engineering prowess.

I probably agree with you, but I think that's a different question. Whatever metric you're using to decide which candidates to offer employment, there's a rational reason to hold higher standards if you believe you have an effectively infinite surplus of maybe-excellent candidates if you pass on the current marginal candidate.

If you don't have that endless stream, you are more likely choosing between "this candidate" against "no candidate" vs "this candidate" against "the next qualified candidate".

L4 is an intermediary level between new-to-industry junior (new grads generally start at L3) and mid-level (L5). In many companies, it's expected that people will reach L5 within some time period.

Failing to have grown skills and project scope to L5 level after extensive time in the industry could be interpreted by some as poor motivation or career growth planning - their thinking is that if you've been doing the same thing for years elsewhere without growing, you'll tend to be trying to do the same things for years there without growing.

Is there a guide for what type of projects FAANG expect for L5+? There was just a thread here about a guy slacking for multiple years, so are their L5s even working on complex projects themselves?

An individual might be trying to get into a FAANG in order to get experience with technically complex projects of a certain scope. A lot of roles out here at non tech or smaller firms are just building and maintaining simple CRUD interfaces. The business domain may be complicated but the tech execution is probably not. I thought the algo gauntlet was a equalizer where exceptional coders could clear the bar regardless of education or work history.

Basically, an L5 (or equivalent level at other companies) is supposed to be largely independently competent (but not necessarily excel) in most engineering areas. They understand the context enough to determine which projects are important (including those they might make), they can identify stakeholders and communicate status and needs well enough, they can project manage enough (or make a project manager successful), they can work through others to a reasonable degree, and so forth. They'll know those areas they'll never be good at, and have some mitigations in place for those. They're self-motivated, think about their work holistically, and generally will navigate the delivery of the project without guidance - but when they need it, they'll make sure they get it.

From an interview point of view, they're probably looking for examples of that independence and self-motivation (ie, not just doing what someone told you to do), and also the step beyond just writing the code towards more holistic ownership (things like "created a new test harness along the way", "did a survey of developers", "made sure there was a killswitch", "created a rollout strategy", "convinced another engineer to share review and support responsibilities").

Thanks, those are reasonable expectations a candidate can demonstrate at any company. OP qualified further that they didn't even consider his projects, the bar is just raised some on the interview questions. That's reasonable.

> Failing to have grown skills and project scope to L5 level after extensive time in the industry

The projects I've worked on in my career haven't been considered in the interview process. They just expected better results on their standardized interviews (algo + system design) compared to a more junior candidate. I don't think the question they ask correlate at all with candidate experience, even for the system design part.

But overall, I think it's an imperfect but fair process.

I'm definitely not going to defend the industry's interview processes' effectiveness at consistently and/or accurately extracting useful information (or even just the information that it is intended to). When faced with the output of the process indicating this "flat" trajectory (however inaccurate that may be), that's just how some people interpret it.

Is there a generic reference for what these levels denote? I work in software but not at a FAANG, and haven't seen them used before.

Edit: I've now found levels.fyi - these are Google's internal progression levels.

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