It wouldn't be unusual to be an E5 at Facebook (err, sorry, "Meta") after 5 years, which is considered "senior" level. The point I'm making is that this title inflation has happened more broadly than just at VC-funded startups.
Back when I was even bothering in Jan/Feb it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening. It’s a coin toss at that point.
Price discovery is not functioning at the moment, there are plenty of theories why.
But high-end tech hiring is a slot machine and will be until monetary policy lets the bond market stabilize a bit.
I take it being an L5 is a good thing? but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss? No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'? And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!
The reason I bring it up is that I'm genuinely curious what life is like in other corners of the tech world. Any way you could translate the above into non-Meta terms?
I have never worked for FB and I thought it was fine. None of that is FB-specific.
> I take it being an L5 is a good thing?
It's implied lower numbers are better.
>> it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening
> but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss?
Yes, due to the number of people competing for the same position.
> No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'?
Salary range implies stability. eg What a company is willing to pay for what positions. There has been a lack of standardization in talent across tech and instability in compensation. Another way to think of it is an increased risk tolerance in wages. This has been fueled by leniency in promotion/raises/hiring when profits were higher.
> And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!
Monetary policy (around interest rates) is directly related to profit margins and hiring. Suffice to say, this is common knowledge for anyone who owns property (beyond a car, maybe) or tracks the job market.
I was 35 years old before I had the faintest idea how money works, like even a little.
And the only way I learned even a little is because I lived in NYC for a bit and ended up hanging with a bunch of Street cats after work, who laugh their asses off about how clueless we all are (in that moment personified by yours truly).
But you get a few G&Ts into them and they’re pretty happy to teach you Econ 101.
That’s at least tangentially germane. :)
I thought it was too minor to even note.
Did we cross paths at all?
I was on Ads for ages, Sigma for like a year, and IG ranking Ml for like 2-ish.
What did you work on? You should pop in the Ex-this/that groups from time to time if you havent, very cool crowd.
The bond market/interest rate comment is saying this is part of why the economy is bad.
Price discovery I am not that confident in the meaning. I think it means companies and candidates are having a hard time figuring out what each other are worth. So you have highly skilled people not getting the offer numbers they want because their skills are not being recognized.
I think you and I are thinking similarly about price discovery. Markets get disrupted, it’s not unprecedented or anything, but in general there’s some price between zero and infinity that a person can make, and seeing that go from X to “no transaction” abruptly is less ideal than it going from X to X - Y because supply and/or demand changed.
Well behaved pricing curves are existential in a bunch of really key markets, to the point that institutions preserve those properties.
Whether one is a tech worker or a struc steel pro or a teacher, anything, it seems a weird exception to “we need differentiable pricing curves here”.
From roughly 2009-2022, the “benchmark” target was ~0, a policy position called ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). This might have made a little sense to like, avoid a depression in the 2009 housing-originated (ha!) financial crisis, but it turned out that running the economy in this super whacky way drove asset bubbles in a bunch of stuff which is an effective wealth transfer from people without serious estates to people with them. This was very popular with the sort of people who decide stuff. There’s this other whole can of worms called “easing” (QE) that arguably made the target rate negative, also a whole other topic.
For reasons that I haven’t heard a persuasive explanation for, beginning in roughly March of 2022 the FOMC started cranking this target up (selling a ton of bonds) and is still doing it, the most recent increase in the target was 2 days ago.
This is going to slow economic activity and on paper inflation, but the effects will usually be felt first and most in what are called “growth” sectors, basically stuff where the value is perceived to be largely in the future rather than the present. With a healthy hand-wave, “software” is a “growth” sector, which is why 500k tech people can be fired in 6 months and the Wall St. Journal can still keep sort of a straight face that labor markets are strong. There is a roaring demand for gig workers who don’t get dental.
This is already too long, so if you want my personal opinion on price discovery in elite software talent markets, reply to indicate it and I’ll write a mother micro-blog :)
I will say that understanding a modicum of finance (I’m certainly no RenTech quant!) is basically a prerequisite for understanding politics, sociology, war, energy, technology, pretty much everything.
One doesn’t need a ton, but being able to give or take eyeball whether the market believes e.g. Powell is kinda table stakes.
And it’s just insane this isn’t taught broadly. I learned even just my modicum mostly by improbable random chance.