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.
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.
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?
jk
If you need to ask, promo parties were suspended with the lockdown, but I guess they are gonna come back in style
That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.
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.
at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.
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.
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.
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%?
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.
People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think you need the top 40%?
> 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.
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.
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
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!
L3: $192,064
L4: $268,758
L5: $358,423
L6: $502,465 (!)
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 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.
Is this juvenile? https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ud3vhp/pro...
A bit of this helps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3hAnAnJwyU
At the end of 2008 I had to add 3 more zero's so a trader could be paid their bonus.
>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.
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?
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.
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.