How I Left YouTube
zhach.news
zhach.news
Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase. Nobody will care or remember what you did or what level you were given enough timespan. Take the bits that you want (money, skills etc) to live life, but don't get too caught up trying to win the game.
Except for the economics part, it is much more fulfilling to work for a smaller company.
I’m 51, worked at two F10 at the time companies out of my ten jobs and hated them both - GE and 8 years later Amazon. I purposefully made the choice of pursuing a smaller company and ignoring constant outreach from Google (GCP consulting division). But let’s not dismiss the close to $100K diference I could be making than what I make now.
Also a 25 year old SA that I mentored at AWS three years ago is making the same as I am making. They are an L5 (mid level) and I am a staff consultant. They are pre-sales (no commission) and I am implementations.
I went from, if not scraping by, never really recovered from dot-bomb to a pretty good job at a medium-size public company latterly. It was "mostly" good. But the difference in money set me up in a way that I previously really wasn't (even if not top tech levels).
That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.
At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.
You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I asked the company for him to stay he got at least 1.7X
Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary
After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.
First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL
This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.
Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.
Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.
Source: got paid 180k and took 2 years off.
at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.
i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.
A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.
If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
It might let me actually buy a house too. 300k is not enough to afford anything in bay area.
So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.
In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
Even at Netflix who is famous for "all cash, no stock, almost never bonuses": https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...
Biggest jump is 400K and that's at L7, for Principal SE, the top level. Below that each level is about a $100-150K jump. Nothing to complain about, to be clear.
> If they had liked the guy and he was truly talented, he would have gazzelled right up the org chart.
Even if you believe they are operating at a very high level of efficiency it is a naïve assumption to make. False positives and false negatives are things that exist in every non-perfect evaluation system.
But you are working backwards
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Oh sweet summer child. How old are you? Genuine question.
But they don’t.
I’ve seen enough people glossed over repeatedly and then when enough people leave and the org is in a less leveraged position, then the promos are no longer an issue. Such BS.
Giving out promotions when people are already working at the level they'd be promoted to is simply a waste of money.
This is the author's biggest mistake. If you voluntarily work on tasks above your pay grade you are signaling to the company that you don't need a promotion.
The problem the OP faced is that YouTube is optimizing under a short time frame and under the belief that employees are fungible. The latter being a common problem with big orgs, thinking there is no value to institutional knowledge. Yet in reality that is often extremely important
Must be “efficiency” why my coworkers have constant coffee breaks to talk about kids/sport/travel while MRs are open without comments for weeks.
They're not going to take pity on you, you know, no matter how much you grovel and beg.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
But, basically, while Bay Area CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
Probably shaped by Bay area narratives, a lot of people assume that you're either living in the city or you're living in some remote rural location.
As empty nesters, at 51 and 50, there is nothing interesting about rural America. I’m in South GA now visiting my parents with my wife. They spend all of the their time between yard work doing things around the house and church. My cousins who still live here and their lives are just as boring - unless they go out of town.
(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
When I was single and younger, my hobbies were teaching fitness classes around the metro area and participating in group charity races with friends. We use to do one every month.
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
My parents retired in their 50s in the early 2000s - mom a teacher and dad a factory worker and they are doing well.
for example a "senior engineer" at a FAANG has more "value" than lead engineer at a no-name startup.
However the skill gap between a lead engineer of a team of 6 vs a "senior engineer" at FAANG is massive.
a "Senior Engineer" (ie [e|l]5/6 at a faang) makes almost no product decisions. There is a team that makes the GUI, product, marketing, infra, and then a bunch of sub teams that look after the specific part that you are currently dealing with.
Your startup person has to make all those decisions them selves and communicate/delegate it
Being an 6/7 feels like being a teenager with a coddling parent by comparison.
But! the point is this, that name, is all just an illusion. There are plenty of E6s at FAANG that are mediocre, there are plenty of E3s that are leaders.
You must make your own worth. Sure you might be working at a no-name company, but that doesn't mean you can't be _good_. The thing that makes you _good_ at the non-coding skills: People, Architecture, communications.
We still have to do the work to get the decision made without the fun part of just making the decision ourselves.
Sigh
There is nothing to overcome. These feelings rise up sporadically. Acknowledge and move on.
- Get really clear about what your actual financial goals are, not what they’d need to be in order to maintain status among game-players.
- Get compensated in ways other than money. For me, working four days a week instead of five, and working remote from anywhere, is worth a whole lot of money. And working at a smaller company is a hell of a lot more fun if you like being part of product decisions.
- If you can, find ways to do things that your ladder-climbing friends can’t do. Spend a month in Europe without taking any holiday. Spend the whole winter in Thailand. Use that extra mental energy from that day off to do something amazing.
I left FAANG about 10 years ago and took a massive pay cut. I’d do it again.
That much time off at a small company sounds rare.
Yes I’m well aware that a “senior developer” in enterprise dev probably makes less than a new grad at BigTech.
And yet we know techies love games and structured process. It is a clever way to make them do what you want to. Techies could have so much more power in the job market and yet they give it all up sadly.
In my 25 years in tech, there were no meritocracies. I came from a simple working class upbringing and experienced upward mobility into the white collar class.
I differentiated myself by always finding ways to solve problems, that others weren’t willing to do. People expected things to be done a certain way, I expected nothing and did everything myself my own way.
I never had mentorship that taught me “how to play the game”. People saw me as a threat, some would copy my work and take credit for it. I don’t have the mentality to fight with people over a game, so I let people win, to my detriment.
I never had hunger for title or compensation, so it was never offered to me unless I voiced my desire to exit.
My friends who played the game are sitting on a fortune, where they have more material possessions, but their kids are struggling and they are struggling, to find peace and happiness, because they are “owned” by the game. They have no substance in their life and compare themselves to others who play the game. A endless cycle of jealously.
I sit here with peace and very high life satisfaction, understanding I have skills that help people, that fulfill a purpose, that comes with healthy integration with my unbreakable values.
Learning to think independently while ignoring superficial reward signals with focus on self concordant goals is the recipe to life satisfaction.
There are extremes like "Ryan works his ass off for puny $50k/year" but generally you get what you give.
not sure what you are getting at. Football is a made up game. People who play it well earn fame and fortune. yeah, don't beat yourself up for not being able to play it well, but don't pretend there is nothing there.
The same is true in every field to varying degrees. For the average individual who can provide for themselves and their families, more money and fame only sounds good on paper. In reality, it invites more stress than anything else.
Veritasium made an excellent video on that: https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2024/1/15/what-the-longest...
Promotion decisions are made by committees which are 1-2 levels above your manager, your manager presents the candidates. They round up a pot of multiple teams which are discussed at once and there are usually hard quotas (like 5%) of promotions to give out to this pot of employees. These hard quotas make it impossible to "do the right thing" because even if a lot of people deserve the promotion, only x% can get it. The composition of the pot of people can easily cause the problem which is described in the blog post, for example if you have a high number of juniors or a high number of employees who joined at the same time or employees with incorrect levelling from the start. If 20%+ deserve a promotion then it simply turns into a game of luck.
As a manager you try as hard as possible to get these promotions but the system of these big companies is just too rigid. Its like a pit fight instead of objectively looking at output. I have seen a lot of people leave for the same reason but I haven't seen a single change to the system in 5+ years.
Next we could talk about layoff mechanics, its equally disturbing.
You missed promo 3 times, and when you left he didn't try to counter you. Is it possible s/he might have been blocking you?
Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.
If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.
In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.
The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.
I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.
TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.
If the company is prepared to offer you a big enough raise to tempt you to stay, and able to organise that raise at short notice, why didn't they value you enough to give you that raise before then?
In all of those jobs, I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.
At the jobs where I was responsible for strategy, one of my conditions for employment was I would be reporting directly to a director or CTO.
They are doing exactly what they are paid to, which is communicate decisions made above them to the people doing the work.
You are correct - that is a powerless position. That's by design. Work isn't a democracy.
Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.
Getting a manger who is too passive, or too checked-out, or just plain doesn't like you, can literally set you back in your career advancement by years.
At Google, in most orgs, manager can influence the chance of success significantly:
- Making sure their team works on what the org leads find "impactful"
- Facilitating cross team collaborations, which will lead to good peer reviews for your report
- Helping your report write the promo packet
- Presenting the promo case effectively during the calibration meeting and being prepared to advocate for the report and respond to criticism from other managers at the meeting
- etc.
There are many managers that do very few if any of these things, and it shows.
Yes, there are quotas, but nonetheless the manager plays a big role in whether their report makes the cut.
There is no harm in saying that you are quitting because you do not feel valued / rewarded enough. Hopefully it will effect change in the manager. Of course it's best to keep it polite and not burn any bridges in the process.
We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense.
Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazing rituals.
You'd be amazed just how much you can learn about someone's actual skills and experience (or lack thereof) through long-form discussion. I think we don't truly talk enough in our currently broken interview process.
My current job was also behavioral where I am a staff architect at a 3rd party company and it does require coding. As an interviewer, I also only do behavioral interviews. But let’s be realistic, it doesn’t take much to be a competent enterprise dev or even an enterprise architect.
The type of hard problems that BigTech has to solve is completely different. While I would never have trusted any developer I ever met at AWS within 100 feet of a customer, they also shouldn’t let me within 100 feet of the code that runs any of the AWS services.
Even at my medium size consulting company we have a 0.4% application/offer rate. Can you imagine what it is at BigTech? How do you filter just by talking to someone?
I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.
> I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.
There is something like that for jobs in design and art sector. Checking what kind of projects someone already did. Checking their website. How does that look? Is it well designed? What are they showing on their website about what they have done?
But the issue with these ideas is, that apparently these days there is zero time planned for actually checking candidate background properly like that. That's why hiring a dev can feel like a lottery. Hiring people work with utterly incomplete knowledge.
You should definitely have a coding task when hiring programmers but it doesn't have to be very big or difficult.
But the actual solution is to not let bean counters and bootcampers do the hiring, but we're a few too many programmer-generations away from anyone who actually knows what they're doing being left at most of these companies, so.
I recommend making furniture.
The problems that spawn these leetcode barriers are WAY better solved at the source.
Prob 1: the interviewer doesn’t know shit about the actual role. I know it’s an uncommon opinion, but this should just not happen ever. I would gladly sit in on a speaking interview for my would-be coworkers, with the hiring manager, to check this. And the actual manager should be present and knowledgeable too. But 3 employees doing something is too much $ I guess.
Prob 2: credentials and high degrees are prolific, super mandatory, but also treated like they are meaningless. Experience is borderline ignored entirely. Worked with a software deeply for 10 years, but your cert is out of date? You won’t even get past the computerized HR filter. But because this is so openly stupid, companies tack on leetcode as another filter instead of rethinking the value of experience and relying on probation and bullshit detectors.
It's not a group engineering meeting. Unless it's big-tech hiring of fungible worker drones, everyone in that meeting should be trying to get more signal about the others as individuals.
I've been the "1" in 2-on-1 three times recently, all for startups. For me, it's hard to think about the hard-thinking questions, and also be finding rapport and getting signal from two different people at once. I'd much rather spend twice as much of my time, to get each person 1-on-1, no additional cost to them.
Two of the recent 2-on-1 interviews were on videoconf, and, with the videoconf setup they chose, I couldn't even see one of the people most of the time.
The other interview was 3 people in tiny conference room/closet (the size of what used to be a one-person cubicle), for an hour, so it was especially stuffy and crowded with 3 people, and a great way to get Covid.
Besides more people complicating the situation, people tend to speak candidly with me 1-on-1, but are less likely to do that if their colleague is in the room or on the call.
Here's an intuition: Imagine you were a company interviewing startup candidates, and HR suggested saving time by you interviewing two candidates at once. It would be awful, and you wouldn't be able to get much read off of either (other than to tell if one or both were sharp-elbowed). So why do it 2-on-1 in the other direction, unless you're saying it's not important for a candidate to get signal about the company and colleagues?
I had a strong recommendation (halfway to hired, before they even met me, with a colleague's favorite ex-manager/mentor) to take over engineering and technical leadership, from a startup's technical CEO.
After I passed his interview, he had me do a 3-on-1 interview with the 3 engineering team members.
They all seemed a little awkward with the circumstances or format, and none opening up.
I passed the 3-on-1 from the CEO's perspective, and he gave me a written offer.
After I confirmed with him that one of the 3 existing engineers didn't want the role (I'd gotten a little leadership role vibe from him, despite 3-on-1), I asked to meet with at least one of the engineers 1-on-1, so I could get a better feel for the team.
The CEO pushed back hard on that, because what you see with them, is what you get.
We don't all get our intuitions the same way. Maybe the CEO could've gotten all the info he needed in a 3-on-1 videoconf meet&greet, including all the info I would get from 1-on-1. Or maybe I could've gotten info that he couldn't have, yet he seemed to be rejecting that possibility.
It might've been a great situation, but I ended up not taking it, arguably traceable to a low-info n-on-1 interview.
If I have 10+ years of proven experience with positive public recommendations written by high managers from F500 companies why should I be challenged with puzzles?
Talk an interview to figure out motivation and if we have the same vibe. Then hire me and decide a month later if I'm worth your money.
Trial period exists in labor law for a reason.
Also, hiring is very expensive for those first few months at big tech. It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly - which is what would happen. Morale at faang is already hitting rock bottom due to the mandatory yearly+ 10%+ layoffs.
Background check is a thing.
>> It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly
Also cannot agree, firing from the probation period does not affect morale. It is rather expected some people cannot make it through.
Promotion at Google, as in many places, is tough. Status is allocated partially on level, so it sucks to not see that growth.
Sometimes lack of promotion can be not having the right opportunities.
It's fair to leave a company for whatever reason.
For any other L4->L5s, or anyone wanting to become a senior engineer, it's worth self reflecting on whether there's improvement that can be made from failed promotion attempts.
> people all across the org knew me and said I was indispensable to the company and were surprised that I wasn't already at an L5/6 level.
No one in a large org is indispensable, but many are very valuable. Many L4s are very valuable, but at doing L4 work. It's not a value judgement.
L4->L5 is a step of responsibility: can you be trusted to handle a multi quarter project, without much supervision.
> I helped launch/lead features on YouTube, I led teams, I designed and implemented systems that were still in use to that day by many people
The details aren't clear here, but sometimes an engineer can be leading projects, and need supervision: poor delivery, poor communication, poor outcomes.
"Too little impact" in this context can mean "you needed too much supervision" or "too little impact per $TIME_PERIOD" meaning you can have delivered great technical solutions, but not at the rate or level of independence needed to meet the mark.
Again, not meeting this mark isn't a value statement. It's a different type of work, but it happens to be incentivized with more $$$.
If the team is already full of lvl5's/6's, there's not going to be enough senior eng work for a new one, particularly when headcount is being reduced.
I had a lote of doubt about my own ability because I never got promoted. Was I not doing enough, am I not making impact. But you should never measure yourself by this. I left for more opportunities and more impact. I actually only knew my own value after rounds of external interviewing
This just makes me feel that the system being described is exploitative. It's dependent upon people not knowing their value.
I'm glad you got out and were able to better define the value you can provide.
Having said that, please don't work on "prioritize user retention metrics" ever again.
The simplest explanation of these datapoints is simply that this person is not operating at the staff level in a way that is fairly obvious to others, yet hard to articulate in a way that this person can emotionally receive and accept.
None of this means they aren’t or can’t be a highly valuable and skilled engineer. Higher levels are more about capacity for high-level responsibility and accountability in a way that makes executives feel comfortable and at ease. “Not enough impact” means that even if this person is involved in high-impact projects, executives do not ascribe the results or responsibility for those results entirely to them.
While this is painful, it is not a bad thing, and it is not a disfavor. People who aren’t ready for great responsibility often underestimate the size of the gap. Watching a talented engineer get eaten alive because they were given executive-adjacent accountability that they weren’t ready for is not fun for anybody. Anyone who has operated in true staff+ or director+ roles at huge companies here knows just how brutal the step up in expectations is. It is far from trivial, and it simply isn’t for everyone.
You can't take denied promos at face value, honestly.
This was my experience as well.
Maybe your manager didn't push hard enough for you at the level calibration meeting. Maybe your director didn't like the project you were on as much as the one another manager's engineers worked on, so they weren't inclined to listen to your manager push for you. Maybe the leadership team decided to hire a new ML/AI team this fiscal year, so they told the rest of the engineering org that they only have the budget for half as many promos as the year before.
And these are the things I've heard about on the _low_ end of the spectrum of corporate/political bullshit.
There is an argument to be made that playing the game is part of the job. Perhaps, but you still get to decide to what degree you want to play at any given company, and are allowed to leave and get a different set of rules. And even so, there will always be a lot of elements that are completely outside of your control.
It's also a horrible swe job market out there. Haha
But the biggest is to never feel like it's a disfavor. You are worth it and there is always room to grow, I just didn't know how else to grow at the company anymore
A growth mindset instead a fixed one, basically.
But if I'm being honest with myself I have a bit of growing to do before I am there. The limiting factor is definitely me. I am improving every year but my peers are excellent.
I'm not "senior", but I'm enjoying my work, I'm making more than I ever have, and I'm improving as an IC.
I can't quite tell from OPs account if he really is the one being wronged in this situation. But I also think places like Google are not for everyone. At least from this post, I think they'll be happy with the new opportunity.
Ugh. Pain. I'm hiring, and I've been filtering out resumes that are heavy on these kinds of metrics.
Because I literally get thousands of entries with these kinds of wording. Often with excessively precise numbers, like "by 23.5%".
My problem is that it's hard to tell the amount of real work it took to do that. It might have been as stupid as creating an additional index in the database, or it might have involved a deep refactoring across multiple systems with a zero-downtime gradual rollout.
I would prefer something like: "I worked as the hands-on leading developer to do a large-scale refactor on the highly loaded front-end network routing system, resulting in user-visible latency decrease on the Youtube front page".
For me the key words are: "hands-on" (and not just writing a product brief and getting resources for it), "large-scale refactor" (so likely not just creating an additional database index), "highly loaded".
But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!
But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.
I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.
> social trust
So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.
That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.
Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.
(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)
I've moved big revenue metrics with relatively simple projects. Anyone else could have done the same thing. And I was building on work that lots of product people and other engineers performed. That "impact" doesn't tell you anything about what I can bring to a new company with different systems and products.
The mouse wheel this guy has been running in, both working for YouTube and preparing for interviews to work elsewhere, just sounds like an intentionally created psychology-breaking torture machine designed to eat youthful enthusiasm and ambition and spit out the dried up shell once the juice has dwindled to an arbitrary low yield.
Jumping from one broken hierarchy to another seemed to be the (misguided) goal.
The above might be a bit harsh, my opinion hardened and my empathy evaporated somewhat reading this line "prioritize user retention metrics"
And it shows through in the product. YouTube’s website is one of the 7 Wonders of UX Feces and they are climbing the ranks at a steady rate.
Maybe it's my own personal working culture, but when I get into a company I'm not thinking about levels, growth, stock options... I go there with a salary, a position and a willingness to help in whatever I can, once I'm not needed anymore (it's usually a combination of managerial direction changes, new hires, new objectives) that's my cue to help somewhere else where I may be needed or wanted. Am I that weird? I honestly don't understand this culture of quarter finance agent, half developer, quarter manager aspirant :/
That bubble is not the world, I exist outside the ladder and I am legion.
Hence the author's "In the software engineering world".
Nothing in author's write-up led me to think he doesn't understand that.
To not play this made-up game, you either decide to stop caring about compensation, or be your own boss. Of course these are not always realistic depending on one’s life situation.
Life is too short to focus on stuff that would lead to deep regrets later. I dont know about you guys but focusing all the time on money and career certainly feels like one, IT engineering is too successful to really have the need to behave so, so it becomes a choice.
I do focus on those but in short bursts and them coast the results for long time. Ie push through some boundary (lengthy acquiring of property, planning and realizing big reconstruction, naturalization process for me and family etc). I never grokked the 'completionist' mindset as a default one, its endless toil and unhappiness in big corporations.
First, searching for videos sucks. Yes, the first few results can be useful, then more and more crap shows up. This just wastes my time. But, more importantly - more and more AI videos means I am being bombarded with more time wasters. I have about zero interest in AI videos; I am not saying 100% of it is crap, but I am getting more and more tired wasting any time in this regard here. Then the addiction by Google to have us watch ads - they killed ublock origin too on chrome. Even aside from this, I am noticing a drop of quality lately; many of the channels seem much more boring. I guess this kind of fatigue kicks in over time in general, but it seems to me as if some youtube "content creators" are running out of real ideas. They seem to be desperately addicted to "get the likes" and "get subscribers". I stopped being logged in to youtube years ago already and I also, oddly enough, want to completely decouple myself from Google too (too much Evil in this company now) - youtube is unfortunately something I still need and use right now, but many things suck more and more. Also that "swipe shorts down" - that activity is IMO a mental problem. After some 30 swipe downs, I ask myself why I am doing this. Google tries to want to commit me to this swipe action. It is like psychological manipulation. Click click drag drag click click click.
I would never use YouTube in incognito mode or logged out... it's positively garish and loud with garbage.
:disappointed face:
That's always the solution when the problem is enshittification. Pay a little extra for what you remember it used to be like.
For only $2 more you can get the large fries and coke, but for $5 more you get the jumbo!
Enshittification is when a middleman platform locks in buyers and then locks in sellers. It's not when things cost money. YouTube has enshittification, but the enshittification isn't merely the fact that it costs money. In fact, any non-shit platform for anything would probably (either be run as a hobby or) cost money to use since it wouldn't fund itself by stealing from you.
Heh, my solution to this is to use DuckDuckGo's Video search tab.
I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.
I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.
Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.
Yes, the reward for more work is always more work. Hard work is the best way to make yourself unseen. Those who get promoted are busy advertising themselves, befriending strategically and may even take credit of your work while you are busy sweating.
>My final conversation with my manager was heart-wrenching. I had prepared a script, anticipating a counter-offer or a guilt trip. Instead, I was met with soft and understanding empathy.
Too much naivety out there to mention empathy even in a startup, let alone when working for a shark as Youtube. That was rather a good news for your manager: no counter offer, but also the fact they never rewarded you internally (L5/6) was a way to push you to leave.
Some manager may seem this way, but my manager (and the other direct managers I had I YouTube) felt the most human and caring people I have met. They had goals to meet, but I also felt they really cared for me (and their other reports). So I really thank them for that.
I recognize this guy seems to only be dealing with FAANG type companies, but the disconnect from my own reality is so vast it’s hard to reconcile.
I have never worked anywhere with the L4/L5/whatever crap. No one I have worked with has either. It sounds downright dystopian that people are reduced to a basically a number (if you leave out the L).
I am assuming he left the job this year? If so, more disconnect. I am working but looking, and this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible. This guy went on a zillion in person interviews? Is he maybe talking about the distant past of two years ago?
The NDA minefield? Maybe I am naive or sheltered, but it’s never came up in interviews and was not something I ever sweated. For the simple reason that there is no secret sauce so magic that I could tell someone in ten minutes in an interview and spill all the beans. But what do I know, maybe YouTube has some secret variable this dude invented I am just too dumb to understand.
I could go on. But the entitlement coming off of this post as I stress about paying bills and keeping my kids in school and fed as I read this on Xmas eve is a lot to take.
Am I that much of an outlier that I need to get with the program? Or is this as out of touch with the current reality as I feel?
No! You’re right where you need to be (just not where you want). Many of us have had a ridiculously difficult year.
You’re not alone.
Now, your compensation is based entirely on your level, which obviously makes it matter a great deal, but my experience hasn't been that there are mind games around it.
Getting through the interview process used to be so easy back then. I probably applied to 2-3 jobs to get an offer. That has changed drastically since 2023.
Of the places I've worked, none of them had anything where I can now say "I should have stayed there for longer." Amazon and Meta have obnoxious aggressive culture. Microsoft is a place where you can chill out and collect a paycheck and good health insurance. But very boring.
I also worked at some much smaller companies, but not for long. Maybe those are more interesting, but also less stable.
My advice: Don't apply on platforms that are filled with spam. I think the best choice I've made for work is posting on Hacker News that I'm looking for work rather than bothering with job sites like LinkedIn. Both times I've done this, this last time even after being laid off, I had a new position within the month. I've never even gotten replies on any other platform: not on LinkedIn, not on Indeed, not on Upwork... but commenting on Hacker News has gotten me a job in relatively short order, every time.
My personal hypothesis is that employers look here to find interesting people... or at least that's how I'd go about it. Both companies I've joined from HN have been filled with obviously autistic people.
This inevitably happens in any large organization. People just have positions like "Department Head" or "Chief Something-Something" instead of numbers.
If anything, engineering/research organizations are unusual because in "traditional" organizations your growth is basically linked to the number of people you direct. In technical orgs, you can be an individual contributor and be at a higher level than many managers.
I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.
The article was interesting and much of it rang true, but not this detail.
I will never understand people who refuse to work at a big company yet complain about money of all things. For reference my last job at Google paid $450k+. It seems like it would behoove you to enter the other world.
Most software engineers are not status-seekers, and are not driven by prestige or a big paycheck.
Big tech companies attract the same type of software developers that investment banks do to finance majors, or MBB management consulting firms do to business majors.
Of course, I'm not saying that those are the people that FAANG-companies get exclusively, far from, but you have to...immerse yourself, and drink some kool aid, before you enter that rat race.
Most people will look at leetcode marathons, infinite interview rounds, relocation, etc. and think "absolutely not".
Of course some people are just really sharp, and can almost stumble into these jobs, but most will have to put some real effort into it, and jump through the flaming hoops.
I'm not sure I agree with this one, I think a lot of people are drawn to software because of the money in the same way people are drawn to being a doctor or lawyer - the job itself overlaps with their innate skills and interests __enough__, and there's the promise of good pay on top of that. I think a lot of software engineers would be in other fields if it paid badly.
It’s certainly not apples to apples with any other random tech job to where you can just compare TC while ignoring level of stress. And the money is good but not life changing good.
Leveling: it is kinda dystopian, but it's easier to define a ladder because it is something someone can work towards (like a skill tree). There are pros and cons, easily definable but dehumanizing. But it's something common in a lot of mid to large size tech companies.
I did leave this year, and that was after two and a half years of trying. It's a lot of trail and error. I did 7 in person interviews. Each session was 2-4 interviews each. And other than the first 3, I felt really confident in each one. But none but the last one I actually got a callback from. And countless other interviews before that that were online or not in-person. It's rough out there.
And NDA at YouTube is something that I was just super careful of. Google lawyers were something I didn't want to deal with later on and I heard some horror stories from other people that left before.
It may not be what is mainstream but this is what happened to me and I thought it might be informational and helpful for people who feel stuck or not as valued. I hope people feel valued at work, at the least.
I hope your search gets better this year! And merry Christmas!
I wonder if the author had attempted to transfer to a different part of the company first, since a different organization might have more room to grow. It might not be possible to do a transfer plus a promotion simultaneously, but it's likely a less stressful option than leaving the company.
Probably would've been less stressful. Lol.
maybe it's the new HN account or something?
This has to mean that the "level" does not, in fact, "dictate the scope of problems one is allowed to solve", but only the money part.
It's certainly legitimate to want more money, esp. when you think you deserve it compared to others. But it's a little weird the article spends so much time trying to explain they want a more senior position for other reasons after having said they're already tasked with solving senior problems.
If you're that passionate focus the excess energy into your own projects, technical or otherwise. But don't give your life to a corporation that couldn't give less of a shit about you.
And this is also why you should be applying and interviewing along the way. Always keep your options open. The corporation is only looking out for itself, you need to be doing the same.
the most important job, that has ever existed, and that will ever exist, is politics. moving up the career ladder you have to start thinking in terms of people, or maybe even in terms of mammals and mammalian group dynamics, cos thats who youre "programming" now, not computers. and most programmers aren't cut out for that, just as most regular people aren't cut out for programming. its hard to say why, but thats the on-the-ground data i see again and again.
i also would like to push back on the "personal projects" mindset - the sentiment often being "just live in your own little world" (not saying it is here, but this is what it often implies.) if youre going to admit defeat and retreat, be honest about what youre doing. dont dress it up as a 'win'. ceding financial/social/political agency is never a victory, but sometimes a neccesity. quitting a mag7 like google is objectively a step down whichever way you slice it. you can count on two hands the number of companies that have the level of resouces that google does - it might be worth to swallow ones pride and slog it out.
The comment about working in your own projects was to say that if you are so passionate you want to keep working behind what you need to put in to your job, work on something important to you.
Great comment. I'm having some trouble correctly slicing the "step down" on the front page of HN where some ex-Googlers sold their biz for $20B. Can you help with your objective eye?
In what insane world does this make any amount of sense?
I'm sure OP is correct that this is a signal for a bad org - but from the outside looking in you'll do anything.
> it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy
The one place where I experienced a lot of rounds of interviews (at least 8 interviews, I think) was at the Wikimedia Foundation. It's an organization that is very explicitly built on consensus-based decision making. There were many great things about working there and at first it was very different from typical corporate culture. In some ways it was stifling, at least for someone who isn't a savvy politician. By the time I left in 2021, they had fully adopted the same kind of leveling system as discussed here, with all of the same political and structural constraints on advancement.
He didn’t have to care that deeply. Alphabet expected from him L4 work. He got paid as a L4. It’s just fair that he also delivered L4 work and spent his effort on something more useful
In the end it doesn't matter, you'll make more money by either leaving or getting a retention offer.
You don't need to maintain it that high, just enough not to get fired within the expected time to find a new one?
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction.
Indeed, but since you understand it, you also don't have to waste your time 13 times?
1. Is it normal for someone who graduated in 2018 tell “with over 13 years” of experience?
2. He quit Google but not got hired anywhere else?
Personal anecdata: I was solo building software projects in highschool that earned income (real product, creating real value, some of which were acquired) and worked on the school district websites. During college I contracted with startups part time while also building projects of my own.
And I have been hired somewhere else. I was really close just to quit early and go to contract work. But I got really lucky with an offer a few months ago. If someone's feels like they want to quit, definitely investigate the amount of work it will take to be self employed. It's a lot, but understanding your own skills and being able to market that is a great ability to learn!
Then again, “fake it till you make it” is known to work too, so you do you. Definitely wouldn’t judge you in this economy to employ every trick in the book.
Yet, still a trick
The intrepid author, however, has not a word to say about any of that. "I just work(ed) here" is the implicit statement. He's preoccupied with his leveling and his personal advancement.
Is that typical of Google software engineers? I wonder.
Anyways, a friend of mine told me the complete opposite than the OP after not being selected to a promotion 2x: He stayed competitive enough to the market in case of any issue, but at the same time he slightly moving to the “Dead Sea” existence where the tenure created a small co-dependence between himself and its employer.
His employer knows that he’s working at a discount in comparison to offshoring his job, but at the same time even being a L4 like can enjoy a lot of free time and agency to know when and where to throttle his productivity.
Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?
Happy holidays everyone! ♥
It's ok. I am in Zurich and an L5 Google employee gets a ton of money so I am happy anyway. I decided that the personal sacrifice to get to L6 is not worth it and I am happy to cruise along for as long as they let me
If you want to drive projects, do it at your own free time.
You are just a liability to the investors and that's why everyone actually wants AI
I wonder what it was that the amazing managers taught him. I've never had an experience with managers that would leave such an impression on me. Fellow developers, sure; but not managers.
They have both the time and experience to help mentor.
However things will change, either at home or at work so you need to balance those out.
When I started out I had this misplaced sense of loyalty to my first job I liked and it really held me back, they paid really low wages but for some reason I felt lucky to work there.
I changed my mindset and realised I’m selling my time to them so I might as well get the best return on my time in both compensation and enjoyment.
The bottom line is you don’t have to except poor pay, bad culture and boring work. You’re in control of your life.
EDIT
Also don’t be scared to ask for a pay rise or bonus. I make a point of doing it at each review and I check its progress in most one to ones. At the end of the day its your responsibility to get paid, you’re employer not matter how good they are us always going to try and save on opex, do you need to take ownership and make sure you’re getting paid what makes you happy.
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Wow. 5 already feels like too many to me. 3 would be closer to ideal, counting the initial screening. 8 is positively too many; 13 is hellish.
It's very depressing when we start accepting 5 as the new normal.
Maybe someone could update it?
“Nobody drives there anymore. There’s too much traffic.”
These companies can do 13 interviews because people will put up with them.
The little place I work does phone screen, work sample, final interview, reference check. We can be done in a week. Nobody wants to work with me bad enough to sit through 13 interviews.
If you're such a rockstar you can probably get shortened loops in good companies through referrals
I’ve never worked at a more soul crushing company. The bureaucracy is worse than the government. There are too many embedded multi-millionaires with 15+ years tenure that don’t give a shit and don’t even respond to buganizer tickets.
If you come across a resume from anyone with more than 5 years at Google throw it away. It means they thrive in an environment where nothing gets done.
I bet this AI slop image is actually leaning more towards photos of a counselor at a hospital or clinic.
Because it has several things that not only don't make sense for the prompted situation, but also suggest terrible HR for a company big enough to have ID lanyards.
A generic corporate stock photo would have a better chance of being appropriate.
But I was really about to quit with a job lined up. I gave myself to the end of 2025 to get a new job. I had savings enough to hold me off, but it was one of those things where I was ready to even do freelance or contract. Putting more time in searching and portfolios. I'd rather get more time making code that was publicly available on GitHub to show my prowness than just talking about it to people.
And I had an incredible support system from my partner. I wouldn't feel comfortable taking this leap without her. :)
I acknowledge that the author (probably) had indeed experienced the things described (at least most of them, as LLMs often like to add details here and there), and it was fine in terms of being interesting, but I feel offended when people try to pass of text formulated by an LLM (even if they put in a bulletpoint draft) without disclosure that it's been written by an LLM.
Can the author please share the prompt containing the draft that he sent to the LLM?
I'd much rather read that!
Expect a mailing list subscription with courses coming soon
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
>This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can't tell your team, "I can't take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming." You just have to work faster.
Guess what promo will get you? More context switching. Maybe that’s a thing to work on.