Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevor-e | Hacker News Reader

Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.

View on HN

Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.

> For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life.

Sort of. Partner engineers got hit hard with forced retirement packages in the first wave of interest rate hike fueled layoffs.

That's a different topic. A large number of E8/E9 in Google have been pushed out recently too. The key challenge is continuous growth. High-level ICs tend to become gatekeepers as the growth of their orgs stagnate. What they don't realize, though, is that gatekeeping accumulates debris and resentment over time, and the value of gatekeepers diminishes over time. A high-level IC either has to make things happen every few years, or reset their project by joining a new org, which means risking losing their institutional know-how.

I have not seen any L8/L9 ICs in Cloud get pushed out. If anything, G needs to hire more high level people.

I don't know about Cloud, but I saw lots of L8/L9s get laid off in CorpEng. Basically, anyone at those levels who didn't have a significant level of scope (i.e. enough FTEs under them), and even some who did, got laid off. I don't know exact figures, but you're probably looking at at least 50 FTEs for an L8, and over 100 for an L9, as a minimum bar to not be perceived as an unnecessary level of upper middle management that can be flattened away.

I was going to say, at Google I don't think the majority of the things the PP claimed as true at AWS apply until L8 (at least in Google Cloud).

Amazon has a flatter structure than Google, and it used to be that L7 was the highest rank (an internal doc cautioned the newly promoted L7s to stay modest even though, and I quote, "people may treat L7s as demigod").

>> blow-out small-to-medium company

This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.

You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.

You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.

Am I over-simplifying this?

Yes, making sound choice is hard, just as our life often hinges on a handful of choices. That said, a coworker of mine mentioned an algorithm that seemed to work: first you pick a company that solves a problem that fascinates you and that has people are you willing to work with. You can check LinkedIn for the employe profiles, and you can rely on friend recommendations. The bottomline is, you minimize your chance of regret when it comes to choosing a company. If the company folds, at least you get to work with interesting people, build friendship, learn something new, and work on something fun and meaningful. The second second step is to rely on math. Give the company a time box, say 2 years. If the company does not have satisfying momentum in two years, then jump ship. Note it's about growth and momentum, however you define it. Everything else is secondary consideration. In 10 years, you will have 5 times. Now, the chance that you will succeed at least once 1 - P^6, where P is the failure rate of the companies. Even if the failure rate is 30%, you success rate will be 99.76%, an almost guaranteed success. And now, if you always join a top-tier company in the corresponding sector, your chance of success will even be higher. There are two catches, though. First, you need to be able to switch job whenever you want, so leetcode hard and study hard in your focused domain of experience. Second, 2 years of experience hardly can be enough for progressing your level of expertise, so you will have to work like hell to make 2 years of experience worth four years, instead of having one month of experience repeating 24 times.

Wealthfront's former CEO gave this advice. Ironically, even though he was a long term investor at one of the Valley's most storied VC firms, he himself did not run a breakout company. Instead, Wealthfront flamed out after 14 years with a mediocre acquisition at the peak of COVID startup mania.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com