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I had to comment on this: > it was because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs. This is almost certainly not the case. It was likel

by cletus 5y ago

I had to comment on this: > it was because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs. This is almost certainly not the case. It was likely due to the answers given in the soft skills interview that belied a lack of experience. The author further confirmed this view (for me) by talking so much about their technical skills becoming rusty. That's actually the natural state at Senior+ levels as you should be spending a lot of your time on influence: code reviews, mentoring more junior people, figuring out requirements and so on. You may be able to get by at a purely technical person at Senior but you're going to be fighting forces pulling you away from that to some degree. Here's the way I like to think about it based on the Google/FB levelling ladder and what you're responsible for: - L3 (college grad): Task. You are given a task to do and need to deliver it. Example: fix an issue with Javascript timeouts on an auto-complete box; - L4 (PhD or 1-3 years of experience): Feature. You will be responsible for delivering a feature. This requires more autonomy and self-direction and breaking down a feature into tasks. Example: add a user settings and preferences panel. - L5 (Senior): Project. This is where you start to work more across different teams. Example: ship rewind for Live videos from backend requirements to UI. - L6 (Team). This is where responsibility shifts. Instead of being told what to do, you should be telling your management chain what they should be doing. This also includes larger projects but often includes forecasting, risk analysis, tracking and so on. On this scale, the author comes across to me with a very L4 mindset so it sounds like they were correctly levelled. What's more, putting them in as L5 could be setting them up for failure. I didn't see in the post how much and what experience the author had but it does matter how much is as an engineer and even how much is in a big tech company. It matters. Here's an example of how this matters: the author didn't like doing so much in Rails (ERB). I haven't worked at Shopify so I may off base here but it sounds like Shopify uses a similar distinction that Facebook does. FB largely categorizes people as product (Product Generalists) or infra (Systems Generalists). There are strictly UI engineers but they're less common than product engineers. There are also specialists. product engineers will deal with everything from the UI (HTML/JS/CSS) down to the storage layer and can include things like providing APIs. As an FB product engineer you may never touch JS. Or you may do it 80% of the time. It varies. But the point is that this dividing line is deeper than a lot of traditional FE engineers might be used to. That's not necessarily good or bad. But it may be different.

jjulius 5y ago
>This is almost certainly not the case. Except that it reads like they had made it clear to them that it was.
- cletus 5y ago
  A better way of putting it is the author has made that claim. That doesn't necessarily make it true. Likely several factors went into the levelling decision. If anything, the (assumedly) limited years of experience were a factor. It may be what was communicated to the author. It may simply be how the author took it even if it wasn't explicitly stated. But what I do know is that (again, on the FB/Google scale) being levelled as an L4 with 5-10+ of experience does happen and it's usually (IME at least) appropriate. YMMV.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
>L3 etc Why this stuff always starts at some random number like 3 or 5?
- cletus 5y ago
  The ladders technically start from level 0. Google actually had L0s whose job, as best as I could gather, was to take things from point A to point B during, say, an equipment install. The SWE ladder however starts at L3. With extremely few or zero exceptions, no SWE is hired at L0-2. The idea is that people at the same level in different levels are at roughly the same level of responsibility.

by cletus 5y ago

jjulius 5y ago

>This is almost certainly not the case. Except that it reads like they had made it clear to them that it was.

cletus 5y ago
A better way of putting it is the author has made that claim. That doesn't necessarily make it true. Likely several factors went into the levelling decision. If anything, the (assumedly) limited years of experience were a factor. It may be what was communicated to the author. It may simply be how the author took it even if it wasn't explicitly stated. But what I do know is that (again, on the FB/Google scale) being levelled as an L4 with 5-10+ of experience does happen and it's usually (IME at least) appropriate. YMMV.

KptMarchewa 5y ago

>L3 etc Why this stuff always starts at some random number like 3 or 5?

cletus 5y ago
The ladders technically start from level 0. Google actually had L0s whose job, as best as I could gather, was to take things from point A to point B during, say, an equipment install. The SWE ladder however starts at L3. With extremely few or zero exceptions, no SWE is hired at L0-2. The idea is that people at the same level in different levels are at roughly the same level of responsibility.