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Comment by cdrini | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)

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> author seems like they were only there for a promotion

It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.

This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely willing to believe that there are parts where people are like this, but I found that people generally did not care about my level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall be promoted".

There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.

> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.

The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.

No, it really isn't.

The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.

An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.

I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.

But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.

Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.

> The amount of time is very long

It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.

What did it used to be?

When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4 years.

That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.

I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.

What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform satisfactorily each year?

Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.

There's different kinds of customers for different kinds of bureaucracies though.

However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.

>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period

At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.

You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.

Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.

Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\

It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.

Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?

If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !

You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)

I will second what the parent poster says, people definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team". This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since I have worked at other places where someone's level almost never comes up in any conversation I always found it a little concerning.

So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened, but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a bit of a dick.

How long would you say Google has been like this? Around the time when they realized they had an unstoppable monopoly? IPO? Early years? Always?

In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.

It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.

This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.

Yes, the last few years there has been a big push to try to hide levels, don't celebrate promos as publicly, etc, but the overall you can't overnight change (if ever) a culture that has been built for two decades around this concept.

> they were only there for a promotion?

My experience: initially, I learned a lot of new things, I was excited to work for a big famous company. But eventually, it started to be less fun and more stressful. There's an endless push for impact or to improve some questionable metrics, while technical debt is building up. Also there's always uncertainty about reorgs and layoffs. Lots of anxiety related to the next evaluation cycle.

After a few years, I can say money is probably my main driver. Although, I don't want to get promoted because I certainly don't want more stress. I want to stay in this company as long as possible because I will be very hard to earn more money elsewhere.

I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to interviews or help their team fix bugs.

Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering?

My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.

Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up in the morning).

Very different from the BigCo rat race.

> And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire.

This is something I'd assumed every engineer-type person faces sooner or later. Unless you're in a massive corp with hundreds of engineers, there's only maybe two or three tiers of engineering roles. That's two promotions, ever, unless you want to be promoted out of engineering and into management. So if you want to stay technical, instead of chasing higher status job titles, you have to chase higher status projects.

It's less about comparing to your ancestors, more your peers in other industries. If you're getting payed say $40/h, that's muuuuch more than most other jobs, and can give you a comfortable living for quite a while.

I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't automatons beholden to their psychology.

Not if you live in a very high cost of living area. Which is where the biggest Google offices are.

That's a good point, but I don't believe it scales at the same rate -- meaning I believe the salaries are much higher than the living costs.

Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k. Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over.

Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo, that leaves 102k. Big difference, and note the ratio here isn't as important as the absolute value. You live a very different life with 102k than with 42k.

And also note wealth doesn't really increase linearly with how much money you have, it tends to be more than linear, because people with lots of money are more comfortable investing large chunks of it, which further increases their wealth.

Internally most larger tech companies index their salary bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over the last couple years has had many companies move reqs from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money.

IME of Big Cos, it is never cost of living that is taken into account, but what "the competition" in the local market are paying, and then some percentile of that.

Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")

This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).

London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.

Agree and not only that, Google attracts a certain type of person that I feel like is more competitive and slightly obsessed with self image (senior role titles for example)

> Why is it a dealbreaker?

Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an hour. That's it.

It's a little more than that. At the level this engineer was at, they are expected to seek and attain promotion. Sitting at a level below staff becomes a negative and can lead to you being put on a PIP because you aren't meeting the declared expectations when you aren't being promoted.

Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.

It was senior (L5) that you were expected to reach, not staff. It was revised down to L4. For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.

> For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.

Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be management heavy, so not that attractive).

Yes switching jobs is often a path to "sideways promotion". You have to interview well, but that's something that's learnable - and more under your control in a way, than getting good promotable projects at your current employer.

Yes, good point I should have clarified that.

> the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?

Based on Blind and personal experience, the vast majority of people in big tech are literally doing that. It’s probably the most used carrot used by management in those companies too, so hard to blame them

> the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?

Well, yes obviously? People get jobs to get money, and a promotion gives you more money.

The ones not aiming for a promotion are the strange ones, not the ones who are.

I'd say that's a rather narrow way to look at it.

I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher expectations and more stress even if it would bring in significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about money.

Fairly sure Google has/had a cliff for engineers to reach senior by a certain time frame. That puts immense pressure to get promoted, or you get laid off.

It's no longer senior, it's only L4 (new hires are usually L3). Also I never knew the time length for the cliff, but I think it was really, really long.

It also wasn't, as far as I know, every strictly enforced. There were folks when I joined (which was when the L5 requirement still existed, but it was in its way out) who had been L4 for like a decade.

Right, while there was a "growth" expectation for L4s written into the SWE job ladder, there were no fixed timelines. Enforcement varied from org to org: at least one of my previous orgs periodically conducted talent reviews, specifically looking at cases like long-tenured L4s to decide whether to intervene.

That was before the layoffs started. One of my by then ex-reports, who was a very talented and knowledgeable but not at all career-focused long-time L4s got laid off in one of the rounds. :(

Not just Google - I haven't seen many companies which would tolerate people being stuck on junior level for many years. They'd be slowly managed out (unless the company is government or really big).

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