Career Asymtotes
molochinations.substack.com
molochinations.substack.com
I remember at Bell Labs they had one title: MTS (Member of Technical Staff). You were an engineer, and that was that. (disclaimer: there were a handful of DMTSes (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff)).
No one said, "I'm an E7" or "I'm a Staff Engineer II". Those statements strike me as distasteful. And begs the question if we're being suckered by Human Resource's gamification of work.
I worked at a company, Pivotal Labs, where everyone's title was "Pivot". It made for an egalitarian workplace. That changed after the acquisition, and we got titles. My proudest moment? Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.
At my current startup, there are no titles, and I'm grateful for that.
It's really not that deep - people do this because both a title and salary are effectively money you can bank and that's the only thing that matters - we don't work grueling, stressful, tedious, jobs just the sake of "a hard day's work".
> Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.
I wish people would introspect more deeply instead of perpetuating toxic relationships with corporations; you're basically saying your most gratifying experience at work (where you are given a small slice of the net on your labor) was when you did something completely abstract and not when you got more money, more status, more whatever? Ok that's like saying my most gratifying experience at school was not when I graduated but when I had to sit in detention. Note I could've said "when I discovered XYZ mathematical principle" but I didn't because they're both equally as arbitrary in the overall scheme (learn skills and move into the workforce).
We may have to agree to disagree here.
Not even just talking about the case where someone's worked in the tech industry long enough with a low enough expense lifestyle that money literally does not matter to them anymore...
A lot of people will work specific jobs not because they're trying to optimize for the most possible money.
This is the most out of touch (and also irrelevant) take you can have. I work in FAANG in the bay. The people around me are solid upper middle class but mortgages, day care, regular cars, medical bills, aging parents, college tuitions, etc etc etc mean very few of them can retire today and continue to live in the same place.
> A lot of people will work specific jobs not because they're trying to optimize for the most possible money.
Then you just work in a completely universe than I do because at every single job I've ever had, from lowly bus boy to FAANG ML engineer, not a single person has ever said to me "I'm doing this for the love of it". Quite the opposite in fact - many people I know would quit at the drop a hat if not for "golden handcuffs".
I'm doing this for the love of it.
Maybe "love" is too strong a word, but I certainly "like" what I'm doing, and I "like" computers, and I have a computer side project that I "like" doing and don't get paid for. Heck, when I was a summer student at IBM I couldn't believe they were paying me for something that was so fun!
Yes, I have a family and a mortgage and bills, blah blah blah. All this is adaptable.
Lest you simply dismiss me, I will say that I have worked at two FAANG companies and another tech giant which was larger than any of them; but my ambition is measured in terms of technical impact, not money.
I don't know the particulars of your budget, but up here in Seattle an FAANG E5/L5/etc makes over 3x median Seattle household income. And has medical insurance with like a <$10k OOP max. And can rent a house, and drive a $10k used car (like me) that gets replaced once every 10 years. Add public Uni tuition and $150k for 5 years of daycare (or have one working parent, see above r.e. 3x median income from one person), and say $30k/yr of elder parent support, and you can still run a 50%+ savings rate. That won't let you retire in 5 years, but it very likely will in 20 years.
I've met quite a few FAANG who've been at it long enough with a modest enough lifestyle that they don't need to work after 20 years. Some quit, some quit and moved to cheaper local, but some are still at it 'cus they like the problem solving.
I've also met several FAANG who bought a house worth 5x their income, are saving for $100k/yr of private Uni for 2-3 kids, drive $100k cars, etc, and save <10% of their income.
It's all tradeoffs.
And yea probably earning 3x median income makes someone out of touch to begin with. But what you do after that income is kinda up to you, and different choices yield different possibilities.
> Then you just work in a completely universe than I do because at every single job I've ever had, from lowly bus boy to FAANG ML engineer, not a single person has ever said to me "I'm doing this for the love of it". Quite the opposite in fact - many people I know would quit at the drop a hat if not for "golden handcuffs".
Well you can count me as one. I've met several others, and was on a team where most were like that for awhile.
Note: all of the above was my own choice, so I can’t complain. I only just want to point out that you can really only keep a true low-expense lifestyle as a single person, or as a childless couple if both of you share that frugality passion.
Wow. I cannot relate to someone who only (mostly) view's their own accomplishments as bargaining chips for money/prestige. Even accomplishments that could have widespread benefit to others.
But I accept productive people can operate in different ways.
Which ones would those be? The ones where you optimized some process so your company could make 10MM more annually? I'm not a doctor/teacher/public defender. I write code that my company sells. I'm not benefitting anyone except myself and my company.
As I noted, I wasn't critiquing you.
> I'm not benefitting anyone except myself and my company.
I don't know what you do, and all good work should be rewarded, but in most work third parties, such as customers or others benefit from work well done.
But I strongly share your opinion that good work should be matched with proportional compensation.
I had a similar problem. I was compensated well for what I could achieve, as a partner to a company, but after many good years, asymptotically prevented from achieving anything. The irony of being bought out of a contract for a price that reflected how much I could no longer achieve in those circumstances wasn't lost on me.
I'm assuming their age because of when Pivotal Labs was a thing, but there was a period from about the late 90s to the early 2010s where many people in the valley believed in an ideal of ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money. It's not like those elements were ever wholly absent, but nominally egalitarian hierarchies weren't the weirdest things in hindsight.
And this is not limited to 2010s! My father worked as a software engineer in Poland in the 1960s, and the communist party had a problem: every profession had at least one member of the communist party except the programming profession. But the Polish programmers weren't interested in joining, not even with the perks of a bigger apartment or cars. Finally they got one programmer to join the communist party, but he wasn't interested in programming, and only became a programmer so he could join the communist party & get the perks.
It wasn’t until one of my startups was bought by a big corp that I came to learn my job title, because suddenly it was tied to compensation. That mattered.
Both views are simplified models, there is no conflict. Non-parallel lines are not a contradiction. For best navigation, triangulate. In a high N-dimensional nonlinear situation, accumulate lines/models/viewpoints.
E: ok watched an interview the author gave and the answer was very boring. He requested a demotion because he moved from management back to IC.
Original title: "Waxing Asymptotic in Career Velocity"
Getting E5 to E6 seems to be the great filter. But if you know what it takes to go from E5 to E6, I think going from E6 to E9 is smooth sailing (provided you find wind in your sails).
But by then the marginal utility of a promotion starts dropping sharply. If you're already earning upwards of $450k as an E5, $550k or even $800k isn't that attractive.
Going from $450K/yr to $800K/yr probably triples or quadruples the amount you can save per year without feeling like you’re constantly scrimping.
That drives down the time to F-you money, which is appealing and gives substantial psychological safety/power.
For me? I’d like to be a CIO someday - and believe I can get there, albeit for a smaller firm where outcomes are more important than politics, which rules out basically all of the Fortune 500. I’m fine if I don’t reach that point, though, as everything outside of work is ultimately more important - relationships, hobbies, enjoying this fleeting existence. Work is a means to an end, and so my skills are means to the end of a better career. I don’t think in terms of salary bands or titles, I look at my career in terms of skills and opportunities.
The traditional career is dead, is my (meandering) point. This article gives some sorely needed wake-up calls that we need to think bigger and more holistically than mere promotion cycles if we want to find our personal success.
The entire idea that anyone can do anything they put their mind to is a lie. There are all sorts of path dependencies that limit what people can do.
What would make us think the same thing isn't true of mental activities? Obviously there's a lot more noise in the signal, and it's a lot more subjective, but there's pretty much 0% chance that if anyone just "tries hard enough" they can become a genius.
My empiric objection is simply to watch this video. Everything here is objectively true:
These are the easy and obvious counters to your assertion that motivation is all it takes to be anything, but it is even true at most things. We like to believe that hard work is all that is needed to achieve anything you want, but any rigorous thinking and life experience will show this isn’t true. People have different skills and abilities, and some people simply don’t have the skills for certain things no matter how much they work at it.
Lastly, some of these things are simply numbers games. Every profession only has a limited number of opportunities, and some of these most highly desired ones are extremely limited. If there are two people who want to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, no amount of motivation is going to prevent at least one of them from failing to get the job. Even if both candidates had infinite motivation and infinite skill and infinite experience, only one of them can have the job.
So "success" looks like "changing the world". Doesn't it mean it can't be done! Just that it's gonna be hard.
not that this disproves your point per se, but, like... saying something can't happen because of rules is silly. Rules change all the time. The NBA example is better. But can a wheelchair-bound person end up professionally-good at basketball? Sure, maybe, in a future where medicine accomplishes a lot and they end up with bionic legs or whatever, plus they're incredibly driven to test those legs on basketball. Why not? The future can be anything.
I don’t think the ability to come up with an implausible scenario where a person could become the thing that seems impossible is the same thing as saying “if you have enough motivation, you can become anything you want”. Both scenarios you described require a lot of things to happen that you are not in control of; space flight changing significantly and colonizing mars aren’t something you can work at.
Also, the height limit isn’t just a made up rule, it is so you can fit in the spaceship.
For the wheelchair basketball player, they can’t just work hard and suddenly the NBA lets people on with bionic legs. That would require a major rule shift, which again is not something you can change through hard work and motivation.
Look, I get why we want to persist the myth that you can accomplish anything though hard work. You CAN accomplish a lot, and probably more than you think, through dedication and hard work, but you definitely can’t if you don’t believe you can. So, we tell ourselves (and others) that you can be anything if you work hard so as to encourage people to try for things they might not try for because they don’t realize they can accomplish the thing if they work hard. It makes some sense to try to delude yourself into thinking you can do anything in order to prevent the situation where you actually could have accomplished the thing you wanted to do, but you didn’t try because you didn’t think you could.
So I get it, but really, if you think it through… there are things out of your control that will factor into whether you can accomplish your goal or not, and you have to be prepared for that, too.
Basically: it is false that you can be anything in particular if you work hard enough. But it is true that the best way to act is as if that were true to some degree, because the outcomes are better for everybody.
I just think you shouldn’t conclude that you just didn’t work hard enough if you don’t achieve every dream. As Captain Picard put it, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life."
And even physically, some things are just what they are. You can't escape death; you can't escape from a black hole, etc. You may claim these things may be possible in the future, but we are talking about what is currently possible.
But, the main way to understand the argument being made is: even if something is physically possible, if it is guaranteed that only say 10% people of people will achieve it, then you need to manage your expectations. It is exactly the same reason why gambling is a bad idea. In the aggregate, you are guaranteed to lose
A lot of grief arises because people ignore this basic concept. And, a lot of things in life are zero-sum: not all employees can be at the top level, otherwise that loses its meaning. Similarly, not all citizens can be president, not all people can be rich, etc.
Recommended Reading: [0]
[0] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/15/pathe...
It wasn’t a good approach for money making, but at least the primary goal was achieved.
No idea which path would’ve been a better life with all things considered.
This obsession with levels is something I see with many junior engineers who have gone through school chasing shibboleths of success. Stanford, MIT, always chasing the well-defined carrot. But often failing to understand there’s a pretty low ceiling to success on the well trod path. Real value comes from solving novel and ambiguous problems without anyone telling you how to do it. You have to realize those levels are meant to capture something about how the most effective technical leaders operate, it’s not a roadmap or a checklist for you to cargo cult. The things that matter are the quality of the work you do and the perception thereof by those in power. “Levels” are just secondary HR structure to manage the masses of employees in large corporations, and if you think too much about them you’re taking your eyes off the ball.