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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

TIL; Google sure has a lot of titles. Curious, why is there SWE III but L4 (I presume level4?) or SWE II but L3? I wonder if it ever gets confusing to think about career progression there??

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There have been L2s at various points in time for apprenticeships and things like that. They keep changing it so not sure if those folks are officially L2s anymore or even what the program is called.

Also there are L1 staff in data centers IIRC.

It’s not that confusing, for most roles you just start counting at 3.

Howops used to even have half levels

It was changed recently, but 7.5 used to be a major milestone with a title change (Group Product Manager) on the PM ladder.

curious — what did it change to? i haven't worked at Google since 2021, when 7.5 GPM was very much a thing.

There was a transition period (think it was 1-2y) where nobody would be promoted to 7.5 anymore. People who were already 7.5 had the duration of the transition to try to get promoted to 8. If they were still 7.5 at the end of the period they were converted back to 7.

I am pretty sure the period in which you were at Google was after the transition started

There are also plenty of L2s on eng job ladders outside of SWE. The levels are kinda sorta roughly equivalent by pay across different roles, hence levels 1 and 2 don't exist in SWE because their pay is below the lowest any SWE would be making.

In practice no one uses the roman numeral part of the title except HR.

So one thinks of oneself as an L3 SWE, or an L5 PGM or whatever.

But really all that matters is your max hit points and the number of fireballs you can cast per day.

The SWE ladder goes from L3 - L9. L5 is a place most average software engineers will stay. Getting above L6 as an individual contributor makes you a very special person.

Does an L9 trump a "senior staff engineer"? Back in the day when I used to interview engineers, I recall staff engineer being a very senior position at big businesses.

I would estimate a senior staff engineer to be an L5 or L6 at Google

L6 is staff, senior staff is L7.

Right but a Google L6 is a was probably a PE at the last Fortune 500 they worked for.

At most garden variety BigCorps that I'm aware of, these days staff engineer is basically anyone with a decent amount of experience. A step above senior, that's about it. Principal is next, and actually does have a bit more meaning, but still not _that_ special. Based on everything I've read, Google L9 easily trumps both of those positions and by a fairly large margin.

Staff Engineer is L6, and Senior Staff is L7. These are quite high, the vast majority of engineers at Google won’t make it to these levels. Depending on the the team/org, they may tackle large, complex problems and dictate the direction of functional areas and organizational strategy.

Senior staff is L7.

Swe 2, Swe 3, senior, staff, senior staff, principal, distinguished, god

In that order, except god isn’t really a level it’s just Sanjay and Jeff.

Swe 2 is L3, goes up by one for each level, thus senior is 5, senior staff is 7, etc

As far as I know, there is Fellow before “God” (aka Senior Fellow).

Senior staff is L7. There are probably a hundred L7s for every L9, if not more.

The official titles are 5 is senior, 6 is staff, 7 is senior staff. That doesn't necessarily map to how titles are at other companies though, a 7 IC is already rare enough that many engineers won't interact with any for years; even most 6s are manager types.

The SWE ladder goes to L10 (Fellow). There's also Sr Fellow (L11) but that might be just Sanjay and Jeff, and I think Jeff is technically on the manager ladder as an SVP now.

If you want confusing, Microsoft starts almost all devs out as level 62. Like, what about the 61 levels below that?

It used to be that new hires are L59. 59..60 is SDE, 61..62=SDE2. That still left the question about levels 58 and below.

Someone addressed this on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-jobs-start-at-Level-59-at-Micro...

Says that levels start around 50 but those lower numbers are for non-engineers. Not clear to me why it doesn't just start at 1 though.

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