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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 h

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?

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?