This is a scam. It's a way to extract more value out of you than what they are paying you for (i.e. paying you for an E5 level, while making you do E6 work).
The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed, high impact work is rarely passed over when it comes to both comp and promo. The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. It’s a common problem in pure engineering, and one that’s becoming more obvious in management as the article alludes to.
I left my last company because there was simply nothing to gain from, unless I wanted to spend the next few years trying to maybe become a manager, which felt like a distant possibility there anyway.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track...
Considering the fact that we're talking about millions of individual contributors, these people are statistically insignificant.
And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.
I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M
Maintaining a (grad_student)++ standard of living while working at big tech means your savings go up fast.
Alas, my current monthly mortgage is certainly not $1500.
But the adjustment isn’t that much different.
A “victim” of a pyramid scheme can become a millionaire, if they entered early enough. Those people play a very important role for the scammers. They will be used as examples of how well the scheme works to those entering the bottom of the pyramid.
Before the Internet, and before Amway in the US, many average folk did not know what a pyramid scheme was. So some of the earlies, in a pyramid, might not even understand.
If this promotion method is a scam (I'd say no, but...), and those trapped inside benefit, they may not think it is, too.
So maybe not a victim, but also not a conspirator?
A scam and a pyramid scheme are not synonyms. Toxic promotion culture is neither a scam nor a pyramid scheme.
A scam is where you pay for something yet do not receive the promised item. Nobody promised you a promotion at Google so it's not a scam.
A pyramid scheme is where an ever growing amount of low level newcomers pay for the returns of those on the top. When you're a low level newcomer at Google, you don't pay for the higher level employees. Google does. Nor does it require an exponentially growing amount of newcomers for the system to not collapse.
As far as I know this is common in most of FAANG and other big tech corps. A friend just left Meta last week due to this bickering, everyone is protective of their work, everyone is paranoid their high impact work will be taken by someone else looking for a promotion.
It's perverse incentives all around, over my career I found I prefer to work in a collaborative environment than in one where I need to be distrustful of my peers due to systemically bad incentives. I'm lucky my current employer is a large-ish corp that fosters collaboration over competition, makes me much happier.
Early capture, network effects, and coasting is more like it.
So the quality of their layers of managers hardly matters, in G, for example, comically so (as has been relayed by insiders time and again).
Google, Meta, and co...
In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals and almost 0% due to management practices (Amazon perhaps an exception).
It was destined to be ultra high margin and destined to have a few huge winners due to facts well outside of the control of the FAANGs themselves.
When you have enough money to stamp out any potential competition by simply buying them out I think we can't really rely on comparing management approaches anymore, it's just a finance game: I got more money than you, I will make you go away.
There are plenty of mega-companies that are very, very different and very, very successful. Koch Industries is a good example. Do they manage with a Silicon Valley ethos?
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why there are not other companies in tech who rival these ones, and that's mentioned in my very first post: the consumer software industry naturally lends itself to monopolization, which we also know observationally has been happening.
Now why can't you find others inside the same industry who compete with these and behave dramatically differently? First of all, management practices across the FAANGs are not uniform and yet they're all up there with one another, so clearly it isn't because there's one incredible management style.
Perhaps instead their trajectory is primarily defined by their industry, as I stated.
Can you explain what inherent "fundamentals" are associated with these companies that destined them to be successful despite themselves? I mean, Microsoft was founded almost 50 years ago. Their success was a given? Management practices have had no effect there? We can argue about the ratio, but it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are, one way or another.
The fundamentals being that they had the most significant bull run in history on top of the lowest interest rates in history on top of the two largest communication-technology transformations in history (Internet then mobile) which happened to produce a near-zero cost distribution channel for a product format (internet-connected software) which has near-zero opex and which has natural network effects.
A very small set of companies were going to win this regardless of anyone's management practices. I think 99.999% of reasonable-sounding conclusions you can draw from their success will be wrong, including "the management style is really really good" or "logos should have blue in them."
> it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are
I am not sure where I made that claim
For example, all of the successful tech monopolists paid a premium for engineering and management talent and had processes designed to hire the best (clearly not perfect but effective enough to make lots of good hires). I’m not sure how far we want to stretch the implications of that but at a minimum there is something substantially different between the top 10% of engineers and the bottom 50% of engineers and that difference seems to matter some.
Over time this starves the almost-winners into “losers because they didn’t do the right management style.” Which, to find this theory even remotely plausible, we have to ignore the fact that many of the almost-winners-turned-losers did and continue to mimic the management styles of the big kids.
This is a horrible well actually. FANG (notice the missing A) was a term coined by Kramer and means absolutely nothing. Apple originally “wasn’t a FAANG” when the term was first coined and it already had a market cap higher than the other four companies.
As far as market cap and impact on the industry, Netflix is a nothingburger. Microsoft has been one of the top five most valuable companies since 2000.
So is ignoring the actual substance of the response. Would've been silly if my argument was "MSFT isn't FAANG so therefore...", but it wasn't.
When investment analysts say fundamentals, they're talking about things like demonstrated business performance.
You're using the word "fundamentals" to mean what investors call "beta", which is almost the opposite of what it means.
Thanks for the flag!
I ask that because you are conflating that there's a causality between internal politics vs business metrics success, which is definitely not that directly correlated, even less in tech which is an outlier in almost every aspect: compensation, growth, scale, etc. There are many more parameters to consider than simply a direct relationship between internal politics for promotions to business success, the whole environment of tech is conducive to create profitable behemoths after a market is captured through hypergrowth. I think the only outlier to this in FAANG is Apple.
In tech if we take the example of Google you can't say that it's because they apply this approach that they're successful. After decades the Google branding is extremely damaged for adoption of their new products, we all expect the new shiny product to die in 1-3 years. The new shiny product was definitely someone's (or multiple someones) promotion package capstone, it doesn't help the company long-term, Google's profits don't come from whatever new product someone created for a promotion, it comes from ads while relying on search to support the ads business, both are some of the earliest products Google ever released.
> Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.
This is not directly related to management incentives to internal competition, show me how it can be directly attributed to it.
>I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice.
Off the top of my head, hedge funds and banks. Not familiar enough with other industries to say so personally.
All their engineers could do nothing for a year and nobody could tell as it comes to metrics. There's no evidence I know of that suggests that promotion culture is the factor responsible for FAANG success.
That’s definitely not true in my org and I haven’t seen that when reaching out to other departments.
Anyone who has been in corporate America for awhile knows that you can’t get anything done without building relationships
They do, if the non-scam course would have made them richer millionaires.
The people at the bottom? No. The people at the top? Yes.
> The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around.
You're leaving out the amount of duplicated work, or rather, the amount of teams that are working on the same thing.
Getting "paid more than you'd be worth anywhere else" has its price.
I worked at a big tech company and saw a good portion of my team buying houses at the same time, a lot of which were a lot more junior than me. I know what they bought, where and roughly how much it cost. A lot of the time, they're only making it work by having (2) two big tech salaries or 1 big tech salary and a second senior-level tech salary. My thought at the time is that it was very high risk.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
If it can work in Spain, it can work here.
If this is fundamentally a model you think if more fair and should be more popular, the logical step would be to get involved in this. Either it will be successful for you and you will be (slightly) closer to demonstrating that it's a viable alternative to the corporate/capitalistic model that dominates the economy; if you end up being able to quit your day to job to replace it with a coop job instead and reach/maintain a lifestyle that you are comfortable with.
Or it won't be successful for you and you will learn why it's not gaining in popularity despite this being a well known model.
The margins don’t simply exist because of hidden information, but because the grocery store is actually adding something to the equation (else if capitalism does its thing, someone else would start drinking their milkshakes).
In the same fashion, you might be able to add X value to Meta by adding some feature to Facebook, and they’re relying on X to exceed your pay, but that doesn’t mean you can produce X value without Meta/Facebook and capture it for yourself — if you could, then you’d be an idiot not to. And I don’t think Meta is relying on their high value ICs being smart enough to provide value, but so dumb that they wouldn’t take money just lying in front of them.
Or the mobster to the shopkeeper.
Or the kidnapper to the kidnapped.
This system is definitely rigged. Just because you get some compensation does not mean it is a fair compensation.
Slaves don’t get a choice in the matter. Mobsters and kidnappers are criminals.
Living is a choice, and in order to do so it is expected that you gather your own food and find your own shelter and we’ve structured society in a way that makes that easy. You can even form a relationship with someone where you merge your resources and time to make it easier and raise other people to eventually replace you.
But if you would prefer to hunt and gather and compete with other humans through a more violent means, that option is probably available to you somewhere and you can go seek that out on your own but it’ll probably be a shorter life.
I won’t tell you how to live, but however you do it, it won’t be without cost to you as it isn’t for any of us even if the cost is much more marginal for some than for others.
Whilst we are being pushed to accept artificial stratification on economic and class levels, there are only two political / economic classes. The ultra rich hoarders of resources, and everyone else. The “everyone else” group represents 99% of the global population, making the hoarders a statistical anomaly. Those folk, however, have amassed $26 _trillion_ dollars of resources, just during the pandemic.
The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt” only has meaning when you remain oblivious to the fact we are _all_ enslaved and we only get the illusion of choice about which set of bastards get to pretend to represent our interests.
There is enough to cover the basic needs of everyone on this planet. We just need to get rid of a few powerstructures before we can get to it.
We are being conned.
If you’ve solved the free-rider problem and have solved logistics, then you have a point, but I’m doubtful to both of those things.
Just so we’re not losing context here, what I originally replied to was this:
> Isn’t the entire concept of employment meant to scam you out of more value for your labor than what you put in?
If employment is a scam, who is doing the work of maintaining farms and fields and transporting food to well, I guess not to market, but to people? And who is doling it out?
What’s the reward for growing more food than you need?
> The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt”
The real reason it’s asinine is that it isn’t scalable. We can sustain some of the people hunting some of the time, but we can’t sustain all of the people hunting all of the time. This is an actual lifestyle that people still practice and the primary source of their food is hunting and gathering. It’s not a lot of people, but it’s some, and the issue is if everyone did it, yes we would have literal violent disputes over hunting grounds and lose most of the world’s population to starvation and war, not to mention all the quality of life improvements we would be giving up.
So we specialize, and in order to specialize we need trade, we need an economy, and we need incentives to do the things we do. Feeding my neighbors is honestly not an incentive for me to work, as crass as that may seem to actually say. Giving them shelter means someone has to construct it, and they probably need land (that’s probably parceled to someone else) and materials (that places like Home Depot sell) and laborers who want something in return, usually this is money because it’s fungible and can represent anything. Then you need the guy to organize it all and pay people and provide the equipment. Usually this guy is the capitalist, quite literally the provider and owner of capital for the business whatever the business may be (building shelter in this example) and since he’s not working for free either, he’s probably looking to sell the shelter to you for a sum denominated in the local currency or retain ownership and rent it out to you. In either scenario, the shelter isn’t entitled to you for free, so yeah, you work for it. Or one of your ancestors did and left you enough money to pay for it. Or left you their own shelter when they died (and y’know, it still needs to be maintained, so maybe you work to do that and keep the fridge stocked and operational).
That’s what living means in this world, and dealing with that low level stuff on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kind of comes first. So you do it basically because nobody will do it for you, and to be honest, doesn’t really want to do it for you except maybe your parents. Humanity isn’t some big family, or part of a single organizational structure with a chain of command, or all marching to the same drum beat in the same direction forward.
Also being kept alive in bondage isn’t actually compensation. I mean there are many reasons slavery is an abominable practice, this is one of them, definitely one of the big ones.
Both implicit and explicit agreement can be problematic, depending on the conditions under which you give them.
> This system is definitely rigged.
How would a hypothetical non-rigged system look like?
well, we're talking about Meta here
And? Why would Meta employees be better off if Meta didn't exist?
People in general are better off living in a better world.
And most Meta Employees would have found other jobs. I mean, sure, in this alternate world some specific people would be worse off. I would wager they would be the minority by far.
Let me know if you get a timeline-scope and we can verify.
Why would a company filling a similar niche be better for the world? I'm not asking for proof, just for reasoning beyond wishful thinking.
Absolutely.
Don't believe me? Ask the lady behind the Walmart counter for her total compensation. Time to re-evaluate your bubble.
Are we all workers quibbling amongst one another while the trillions are funnelled away at the expense of a liveable planet?
We are being conned.
No need to look in the mirror and realize our privilege.
This meme that tech workers are obscenely overpaid is just an example of how the propaganda of the truly wealthy elite works. Instead of standing in solidarity with the counter lady and doing things to lift her up, you’d rather tear the IC down. It’s sad.
Those millions that were wasted and later "saved" were likely because somebody misunderstood AWS billing and hacked away without bothering. Likely also being compensated royaly.
This bubble and the consequence of feeling entitled left and right is pretty disturbing.
I also get zero stocks, and zero bonuses. After 6 years working for the same company including many roles where I was basically team lead and engineering lead as a "Base level software developer", including being the sole holder of important legacy knowledge. I make $70k before taxes in a high cost of living area. Maybe we could build a system that rewards doing good work instead of rewarding job hopping and bullshitting. I once had a manager that did zero work for an entire month before he was asked to leave. He was made my manager because he sucked at doing basic coding. He made more than me from day one. This is very common for the normies like me who don't live in SV and basically do all the work that makes things happen not on google.com or facebook.com
I am also currently required to be working at 9am, AND attend meetings at midnight in my timezone because we have a big office in India and most of my team are there. I am also perpetually "oncall", though only for "serious" issues, neither of which I receive compensation for because tech workers are exempt and my employment contract was a single paragraph saying "You will do what we need you to do" and when I signed that I was fresh out of college with one year experience, $300 to my name and $1200 rent due in two weeks. I could leave but I am permanantly on medication just to live a normal life so here in the States I get to be shackled to my job unless I spend valuable personal time planning out a way to keep my medication going after I lose insurance.
So how about realize there are plenty of us not working in FAANG. Meanwhile, when a google engineer builds a system to improve ad targeting, how much of that money goes to the engineer, vs how much goes to the VP who made the vague suggestion of "lets make ad targeting better", as if vague, completely obvious ideas like that have value.
Or it's a realistic view from outside your bubble.
Check out the income distribution of the U.S. public and realize that the typical software engineer is within the top 1% when considering total compensation. And put that in relation to what the typical programmer contributes to society which is rarely within the top 1%.
> Instead of standing in solidarity with the counter lady and doing things to lift her up, you’d rather tear the IC down. It’s sad.
I stand in full solidarity with the Walmart lady. Lifting her up doesn't mean gettinf her into programming bootcamp though. Her rent is so sky high because all the insane tech worker compensation around her inflated housing costs.
The comments in this thread makes all this entitlement pretty obvious.
This doesn't negate my point about propaganda. There is a long and deep history of the wealthy classes pitting the lower classes against each other in this very way, primarily by directing anger at the middle tiers from the lower, and a fomenting a sense of fear of the lower tiers in the middle.
I have checked out the income distribution in the US: you're way off. The typical software engineer has a total compensation less than $150k (pick any source: salary.com, indeed.com, etc.). The top 1% of salary is more than $350k in the lowest income states (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...).
> I stand in full solidarity with the Walmart lady. Lifting her up doesn't mean gettinf her into programming bootcamp though. Her rent is so sky high because all the insane tech worker compensation around her inflated housing costs.
You stand in solidarity with the top 5%, because you're contributing to their propaganda efforts. Housing costs are inflated primarily because collectively housing is in shortage--a condition the wealthy love to see because they're relatively insensitive to it (they don't live where we do) and it also serves their propaganda interests (see above), which you seem to have taken up with glee.
Considering yourself part of low class if you are a software engineer is the root issue here.
> primarily by directing anger at the middle tiers from the lower, and a fomenting a sense of fear of the lower tiers in the middle.
I'm not arguing that the effect you are describing doesn't exist. The point is that you are applying to the wrong part of society.
> I have checked out the income distribution in the US: you're way off.
"Way off" is not accurate. The income distribution is extremely steep at the top end. If 1% is at 350k the 150k is not far away. 2%? 3%? The page you linked doesn't load from where I am located. It's surely within the top 5% which you still ascribe to be the elite that's manipulating everybody. I'm doing the exact opposite of expressing support.
Not that Meta didn't actually manage to scam add money out of companies.
> Isn’t the entire concept of employment meant to scam you out of more value for your labor than what you put in?
But yeah sure, if you’re the one scamming people then maybe you eat just fine. Not really the context though.
Similar to how it doesn't include housing appreciation, but does include imputed rent... in the long term rents and the cost of a house will track each other as well, just sometimes for even maybe a decade one surges ahead of the other.
The top of the new band is much higher of course, but there isn't as much immediate payoff.
I work in a half technical (hands on development)/half customer facing role in BigTech - cloud consulting.
I was a software developer mostly working at small companies until 2020. There were never any promotion guidelines and I knew to make more money I needed to job hop.
For context: a “work stream” is a series of task meant to achieve an outcome. Depending on the complexity of a project, it can have multiple work streams.
The expectations are for the first 3 levels are:
An L4: you’re expected to be able to gather requirements from a customer and understand their business needs for one work stream. Help implementing a solution and present the solution to the customer. If you can’t demonstrate that you can do that as an intern, you won’t get a return offer.
The problem is well defined. You are not expected to design the solution without help.
L5: You should be able to do what the L4 does and lead a work stream, design the solution, implement it, and manage your own work and customer delivery.
The problem is mostly defined (ie low ambiguity). You are expected to be able to define the solution.
L6: All of the requirements of an L5. But you should be able to manage multiple work streams in a project and here the problem is not well defined (high ambiguity).
At each level it is about increasing “scope” and “impact”. Do you suggest someone be promoted without proving they work at the next level? How will that affect the customer?
Just because you’re good at taking orders when everything is spoon fed to you (L4) doesn’t mean you can design and manage an implementation. Are you going to let an L4 with no demonstrated skill loose on your AWS account? Be responsible for your HIPAA compliant implementation?
An L5 that can handle their work well, show a deep technical understanding and can manage their workstream is not necessarily good at managing multiple related work streams (more scope), nor does it mean they can handle pre-sales work unassisted (high ambiguity).
You learn it as you go. Like some of the most succesful managers and CEOs to ever be (including Jobs, Bezos, and PG)
And if you can't learn, you get put somewhere else.
>What happens to their reports that have to deal with an unqualified manager?
As if most managers aren't already incompetent anyway...
And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
And who are they going to “learn” from and what happens to the company as they are learning? What do you think happens to a department consisting of in demand developers when they get an incompetent manager?
Even though I mostly worked at small companies before working at BigTech, I did work at one at the time F10 non tech company from 2012-2014. An incompetent manager who was good technically got promoted. Within 6 months his entire team of 14 left.
I don't know, most of them? Most companies have their founders as their CEOs until they become very successful, and these are their first gigs as CEOs of a big company, right?
In a real capitalist society where success wasn't tied to optics and stock performance but actual products, the "adults" would have burned the company to the ground.
I remember him making the product that saved the company and had their future 15 years without him based on. And I remember him being ousted without be given a chance by pencil pushers.
Almost all succesful startup founders who haven't had managed anything before?
There's something fishy about how developers continue to demonstrate the ability to write/ship software but they don't get regular raises, but it works differently for managers/execs for some reason. This and the poaching agreements are why we have job hopping as the primary lifting force of compensation.
It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work: that L6 pay doesn't scale with output/revenue impact.
It should actually be the opposite because managerial badness might happen in big bangs (whole team leaving) or very obvious red flags (abusive shitbags), but developers have access to a lot more objective information that could be used to drive promotion decisions, but that still doesn't happen.
They do, there is an L4 to at least L7 track as an IC in BigTech and even on the corporate dev side, you can job hop your way from $80K to $170K in most major cities in the US within 8 years of starting your career.
> It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work
I didn’t mean to imply that an L6 is doing the same type of work, as a purposeful L5 I likes being able to deep dive on one “work stream” from requirements, to implementation to handover.
An L6 wouldn’t be putting in more hours they would be coordinating the work of multiple L5s. They aren’t doing more work, they are doing different work. Their contribution is valuable. But someone has to be in the trenches doing the work.
Kind of defeats the purpose of levels, no? Make me a Principal Engineer, I'll learn it as I go.
> And if you can't learn, you get put somewhere else
1) This is already what happens, except without the added risk of asking someone to perform a new higher level role
2) Demoting someone is basically impossible. They're just going to quit rather than taking a lower title and pay cut
Demonstrating you how to do the next role, before getting the role, seems reasonable.
Not a hard requirement, but not unreasonable.