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Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

My current company has no concept of “levels” within software engineering. Coming from a big company, where criteria for promotions and a whole process and ceremony around them existed, this was a huge shock to me. I’ve now been there about a year and the culture is not at all competitive. Nobody is competing for an (artificially limited) pool of promotions. Nobody is competing for status. We are all trying to do our best work to the furtherance of our company’s objectives.

It is a much more relaxing way to work. I don’t have to worry about if I am checking all the boxes to get a promotion. I don’t have to fight with my manager about why I didn’t get one but <other person> did. I don’t have to worry about if I’m on the most high-profile project. I can breathe, and I can focus on my work.

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> It is a much more relaxing way to work. I don’t have to worry about if I am checking all the boxes to get a promotion

I work at BigTech and I am just as relaxed. But I took another route.

I fell into a BigTech role (cloud consulting department) late into my career (46) without really even trying.

I had no previous consulting experience and had only opened the AWS console two years prior for the first time when I also fell into a role as the de facto “cloud architect” responsible for leading “application modernization” at a startup.

I had made a good life for myself and had the big house in the burbs in the good school system as a journeyman enterprise C# developer.

I got the job, started down the road of working toward getting a promotion to an L6 from an L5 (mid level) and then a year in realized that I didn’t care about a promotion, I didn’t want the headache of worrying about “increasing scope and impact” and hated the entire politics and self promotion of trying to get there. I could see that my expenses not only weren’t going up, they would go down in the next couple of years. I work remotely.

I told my manager my goal was to “improve at my current level”.

By the end of my four year initial offer, I will probably be looking to go back to small to midsize companies and most likely will take a cut in compensation to do it.

Interesting trajectory and this approach should be normalized.

I too am intentionally moderately ambitious only in the sense that I work at a lower level compared to what would be my maximum potential. But still at a high enough level for work to be interesting and the pay enough for my needs.

I do not desire more responsibility or complexity.

Honestly, I believe most of your work force should be like this. Competent stability. Promotions should be an exception.

Like you, I intend to ultimately scale down further as I age. I can't afford to retire early but I definitely can afford to lower my income.

Can I ask- DC metro area?

Atlanta until last year.

Now,

Everywhere…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966

This is not how it works for some other people.

And you’re free to make different choices. If I was meeting all of my goals making $150K a year at 46 (the amount an intern I mentored got as a return offer), do you really think I am struggling meeting my financial goals making BigTech money working remotely ?

This isn't what I was talking about. You're talking about slinking into a quick 6 figure job. That's not how a lot people get there. A lot had to go right for you for that to happen, not the least of which was the state of funding in the tech industry.

It’s not like Amazon needs to get outside funding to continue operation.

And I wouldn’t call it “quick”. While I knew nothing about cloud, I literally had over two decades of experience as a developer.

I know some companies have tried this. It works at small scale and early on, however, over time, people want to see career progression.

Secondly, without levels, inefficiency creeps in at scale as it's not clear who the decision maker is.

Again, at small scale, this may work, but as companies grow, this becomes much harder.

the nice thing about levels on the flip side is that you can communicate with your peers about your progression without necessarily having to give your salary.

When I talk to somebody a level above, they're very open about when and how they got that promotion. I don't expect that they would communicate as openly with me about their salary, unless we had a particularly close relationship.

I mentioned in a previous post that I worked in the consulting department at BigTech. When I need some advice or a sanity check about something I am implementing, I reach out to the team responsible for the service (ie S3, Lambda, etc) if I’m doing something novel or if I find a reproducible bug.

I could care less about titles. Especially knowing that the levels have nothing to do with technical capabilities passed an L4 to L5.

Can I ask for a referral?

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