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Your L4+ levels seem pushed up by one to two. Levels should align to manager equivilent scopes. Based on my own experience at peer company and https://www.q

Your L4+ levels seem pushed up by one to two. Levels should align to manager equivilent scopes. Based on my own experience at peer company and https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Googles-technical-career-track https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Googles... L4: Capable of independent work on a project and coordinating with a small group (1-2 others). (note this is PhD starting level) L5: Capable of leading your team (e.g. as a tech lead). Maps to entry-level manager L6: Capable of leading a large team (e.g. large team TL). Maps to more seasoned manager. L7: Lead project across multiple teams well. Maps to senior manager (manager of managers) L8: Lead project across multiple orgs/large org. Maps to director (manager of managers of managers). At a series B stage company (say 100 eng), on manager track, L7s might be called directors. L8 would be VP engineering.

josh2600 8y ago
To be clear, there are different levels for managers and engineers. An L7 engineer is a seriously dope engineer (like the kind of person you'd want to found a hard technical company with; think low-level problems like DMA). An L7 manager maps to a senior engineering manager. I have talked to a couple L9 engineers and they're monstrous. L9 managers are directors or VPs.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  Can you give an example of a project an L9 engineer would work on?
  - brilee 8y ago
    Invent TensorFlow. Design a new language (Go). Invent new storage formats (Capacitor)
    - shostack 8y ago
      Interesting. Any insight into what comparable projects might be in other roles at that level? Is that more like "launch a new product globally" territory?
- __float 8y ago
  Why is "hard tech" == "low-level"? There are plenty of interesting and challenging technical problems that are "higher level" but more difficult due to scale/latency/etc demands.
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
    Besides, DMA isn’t really a “hard” problem as far as I am aware...
    - deanmoriarty 8y ago
      https://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/ https://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/
      - Cyph0n 8y ago
        Oh, so now we need to feign being impressed so no one gets their feelings hurt? The fact of the matter is, were DMA indeed a hard problem, I would not have posted the comment. So instead of posting a link to a blog post, perhaps you could try to disprove my claim?
        deanmoriarty 8y ago
        In my experience, if you think that implementing from scratch a DMA solution is not hard, then you are an extraordinary talented engineer, far above the level you find at FAANG, so your opinion on this matter is not terribly relevant. It would be as if Jeff Dean came and said writing MapReduce is not a hard task. Nice, but not relevant for the 99.9999% of the talent pool. I got a couple offers over the years for L5-L6 positions at FAANG (specifically Google and Facebook) to work on low level stuff, including system programming and kernel development, since I have a few dozens upstream Linux kernel contributions in some subsystems I dabbled with. I also had to deal with writing a video4linux custom driver for an embedded industrial machine and a very custom acquisition card using DMA in the past, and it was significantly difficult even to just make it work playing with the well-defined kernel DMA APIs. I can easily see how the complexity required to write the entire kernel plumbing framework that makes DMA possible to leverage for normal developers like me would be a hard engineering task, definitely one that deserves an L7 architect/engineer capable of coming up with the right level of abstractions, incredibly important for a C kernel API. Just because one can explain on a whiteboard what DMA is and how it is supposed to work by remembering the OS college class (I'm not saying that's you), it doesn't make it an easy engineering task, engineering it's about making things work. I'm sure if you go back to the LKML mailing list and look at the time period where DMA support was initially introduced in the kernel, you'll be surprised at the sheer engineering complexity that was discussed when introducing such core kernel feature. In conclusion, the fact that FB and GOOG wanted to hire me to work on stuff relatively close to what we're talking about, at a level that is considered senior, gives me some legitimacy to say that me thinking it's a hard problem isn't probably too far from the truth, otherwise we are somehow assuming that FAANG extends offers to incompetent people (multiple times), mistakenly considering them senior engineers. I take your original comment as naive as the people who say "I could have built Instagram/Whatsapp tech in a week!", because you either are a super expert, or you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Perhaps you should consider getting an offer for $1M/y (or more! Since L7 tasks are easy for you maybe you can shoot for an L9 and ask $2M/y, I have a close friend at GOOG at that level who gets paid that much) there then, if you're not already in that elite band of compensation?
joshuamorton 8y ago
Your comparison to a 100eng company seems off. There are L8s that lead orgs of more than 100 people they'd map to cto or ceo. Indeed given my own experiences, many L6s have L5 TL/M reports. I'd say L7 is the better mapper to vp of eng at a 100 eng company. That allows you to have 2-3 VPs under the CTO.
- usaar333 8y ago
  We're thinking the same scope, just different titles. I'm more familiar with companies that level set as follows: VP Engineering -> runs the 100 person org <L8 equiv> Director -> manages managers (30 person org) <L7 equiv>

josh2600 8y ago

To be clear, there are different levels for managers and engineers. An L7 engineer is a seriously dope engineer (like the kind of person you'd want to found a hard technical company with; think low-level problems like DMA). An L7 manager maps to a senior engineering manager. I have talked to a couple L9 engineers and they're monstrous. L9 managers are directors or VPs.

Benjammer 8y ago
Can you give an example of a project an L9 engineer would work on?
- brilee 8y ago
  Invent TensorFlow. Design a new language (Go). Invent new storage formats (Capacitor)
  - shostack 8y ago
    Interesting. Any insight into what comparable projects might be in other roles at that level? Is that more like "launch a new product globally" territory?
__float 8y ago
Why is "hard tech" == "low-level"? There are plenty of interesting and challenging technical problems that are "higher level" but more difficult due to scale/latency/etc demands.
- Cyph0n 8y ago
  Besides, DMA isn’t really a “hard” problem as far as I am aware...
  - deanmoriarty 8y ago
    https://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/ https://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/
    - Cyph0n 8y ago
      Oh, so now we need to feign being impressed so no one gets their feelings hurt? The fact of the matter is, were DMA indeed a hard problem, I would not have posted the comment. So instead of posting a link to a blog post, perhaps you could try to disprove my claim?
      - deanmoriarty 8y ago
        In my experience, if you think that implementing from scratch a DMA solution is not hard, then you are an extraordinary talented engineer, far above the level you find at FAANG, so your opinion on this matter is not terribly relevant. It would be as if Jeff Dean came and said writing MapReduce is not a hard task. Nice, but not relevant for the 99.9999% of the talent pool. I got a couple offers over the years for L5-L6 positions at FAANG (specifically Google and Facebook) to work on low level stuff, including system programming and kernel development, since I have a few dozens upstream Linux kernel contributions in some subsystems I dabbled with. I also had to deal with writing a video4linux custom driver for an embedded industrial machine and a very custom acquisition card using DMA in the past, and it was significantly difficult even to just make it work playing with the well-defined kernel DMA APIs. I can easily see how the complexity required to write the entire kernel plumbing framework that makes DMA possible to leverage for normal developers like me would be a hard engineering task, definitely one that deserves an L7 architect/engineer capable of coming up with the right level of abstractions, incredibly important for a C kernel API. Just because one can explain on a whiteboard what DMA is and how it is supposed to work by remembering the OS college class (I'm not saying that's you), it doesn't make it an easy engineering task, engineering it's about making things work. I'm sure if you go back to the LKML mailing list and look at the time period where DMA support was initially introduced in the kernel, you'll be surprised at the sheer engineering complexity that was discussed when introducing such core kernel feature. In conclusion, the fact that FB and GOOG wanted to hire me to work on stuff relatively close to what we're talking about, at a level that is considered senior, gives me some legitimacy to say that me thinking it's a hard problem isn't probably too far from the truth, otherwise we are somehow assuming that FAANG extends offers to incompetent people (multiple times), mistakenly considering them senior engineers. I take your original comment as naive as the people who say "I could have built Instagram/Whatsapp tech in a week!", because you either are a super expert, or you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Perhaps you should consider getting an offer for $1M/y (or more! Since L7 tasks are easy for you maybe you can shoot for an L9 and ask $2M/y, I have a close friend at GOOG at that level who gets paid that much) there then, if you're not already in that elite band of compensation?

joshuamorton 8y ago

Your comparison to a 100eng company seems off. There are L8s that lead orgs of more than 100 people they'd map to cto or ceo. Indeed given my own experiences, many L6s have L5 TL/M reports. I'd say L7 is the better mapper to vp of eng at a 100 eng company. That allows you to have 2-3 VPs under the CTO.

usaar333 8y ago
We're thinking the same scope, just different titles. I'm more familiar with companies that level set as follows: VP Engineering -> runs the 100 person org <L8 equiv> Director -> manages managers (30 person org) <L7 equiv>