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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to see people rough idea of YOE to Level mapping for MSFT. Everything from Level 50 through 60 looks pretty junior, like grad hires and possibly outside HCOL areas. Surprised there is so much granularity.

I do also find the base to stock ratios interesting. I guess base pay caps out in FAANG the same way it does in fintech / Wall Street tech. $360k base is a lot of money obviously, but its interesting you can have like a $1M signing bonus & $1.25M TC but never get about $360K base.

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For software engineers, 59 is entry level (e.g. a college hire). Promotion to 61 (SWE 2) usually happens in 2-4 years of experience. Promotion to 63 (Senior) is usually 5-7 YoE. Promotion to 65 (Principal) is highly variable but a capable person who climbed the ladder all the way from 59 and didn’t get stuck with a crappy team/manager along the way would usually get there around 9-10 years, give or take.

Level 59 is entry-level for an SE (e.g. an undergraduate hire), Level 58 is for Interns. People at Level 59 are expected to reach Level 60 within 2 years or they'll basically get managed-out, but once you get past Level 61 people generally take things more slowly.

In West Coast circles (Blind.app, et al) Microsoft's reputation is that it's still "the country club" where you go if you want a stable career without too much excitement (or stress) - if you play your cards right (and dodge the occassional round of layoffs) you can still live the baby-boomer dream having a single-employer-for-life untill you retire.

The downside is you have to put up with Microsoft's ineptitude. I was on a Microsoft project for about 6 months and it was a terrible experience. Everyone was out for themselves, asking questions was treated as an annoyance. Condescension at every turn. It was a small team and perhaps not representative of all of Microsoft, but it was a bad enough experience that I'd never consider working there in any capacity.

My experience was the opposite. I was surrounded by veritable gods of the industry but you wouldn't know it in-person; I even shared a hallway with at least 2 people who had their own Wikipedia articles.

Yes, I had a bad case of imposter syndrome too.

Microsoft is a massive company. Each org and team are very different. I worked there for a few years and my team was extremely old school (waterfall, no automation, all manual QA, heavy upfront planning, etc) while I had friends in other parts of the company where it was pretty much the exact opposite. The same can be said about talent density, innovation, etc.

> are expected to reach Level 60 within 2 years or they're automatically out-the-door

That part isn't true. Some people stay at L59 for much longer and there isn't any "automatic out", at least in the US.

The base pay is effectively capped because salaries are taken out of money that is taxed. That's why CEO's used to stop at $1M. (Maybe they still do.) Everything else is stock because it's "free" money for the company to give away.

This isn't true if they are restricted stock units (RSUs) which are taxed as income yearly even if you do not sell

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