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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Promotion-orientation is bad, but so are promotion levels that are considered "almost impossible to reach".

Levels.fyi doesn't seem to agree with your title inflation evaluation: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon,Microsoft&trac...

It's only 3 data points, but it seems that Amazon Senior is comparable to Google senior, and it's Microsoft that inflates the Senior title.

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Sort of. The main issue is that AMZ/AWS doesn't differentiate (by title) between someone recently promoted to L6 (generally ~8-10 YOE) and someone deep in to L6 (~12-15 YOE). Other companies solve this with the Staff Engineer title, but AMZ doesn't have that. If you're an L6 who reports to an L7 Sr. Manager then you're functionally a Staff Engineer and supposed to be on the Principal track. Mileage varies across orgs/teams.

Gist: "junior" L6 SDE is more like Google L5, "senior" L6 SDE tracks mostly with Google L6 (or even L7 in rare cases).

Are you sure about this?

I think it's more like Google junior L6 SDE is equivalent Uber L4.5, which itself is about the same as senior AA at Oracle (= like a L11 at Twitter).

You’re right. Amazon’s L6 do not have larger packages than Google. On the other hand, Amazon has a flatter structure. Amazon’s L6 used to influence more than 100 engineers, advising general managers, owning an entire product line, if not more. Go figure.

You're right, but when they adjusted the L6 role guideline (circa 2016), it was specifically to clarify that the L6 role was never intended to have that span of influence. Rather, every 2-pizza team (8-13 people) should have a sr. engineer. What at Google would be a Tech Lead.

Yeah, L6 is the new L5, and L7 L6. That's bad for those who joined Amazon as L7 and thought that they didn't have to work for title any more.

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