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It would be great if promo wasnt such a big deal. But when I look at the comp for an L3 software engineer, and the comp for an L5 software engineer, I have a h

It would be great if promo wasnt such a big deal. But when I look at the comp for an L3 software engineer, and the comp for an L5 software engineer, I have a hard time seeing how you could make people pay less attention to promo. I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

pavlov 4y ago
Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way. Here's a blog post explaining their approach: https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-salaries/ https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s... Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone building up a software engineering workplace.
- elefanten 4y ago
  “ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote” I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to join?” In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?
  - dolni 4y ago
    Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO. You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere. There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.
    - cyanydeez 4y ago
      If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.
      - RHSeeger 4y ago
        Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.
        bjt 4y ago
        While I see your point, I'd argue with "there's no benefit to doing better." People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.
        RHSeeger 4y ago
        I would expect the majority of people are more motivated by having some skin in the game than they are by the rewards of doing the work itself. I get great joy out of making my clients happy and solving hard problems (I enjoy rabbit holes), but even I get frustrated when there's no real advancement (financial or otherwise) for doing a better job.
    - lanstin 4y ago
      The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year. I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how they feel about the system. It may well be that this appeals more to mid-career people with families and other life to worry about. But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture interviews, and has an interesting product space where you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this combination would be appealing to early-career people, especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or aren't set on acquiring that kind of résumé.
  - gowld 4y ago
    > In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%? Why do you think you need the top 40%?
  - rsanek 4y ago
    They mention this potential downside explicitly in the blog post. It sounds like they actually believe this is a good thing as it signals to junior employees that would need alot of support that they cannot provide it: > The way we’ve set up our levels, people in the early stages of their careers can get bigger titles and raises more quickly at other orgs than they can at Daily. This will likely be a deterrent to some early-stage candidates, but we are ok with that for now. While we are excited to bring in early-career people once we have the structure to support them, we aren’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a while. We don’t want to make the mistake of hiring high-potential people we then under-serve, especially if they’re from groups typically excluded from tech.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Japan traditionally has that “getting promoted after X years” approach. At scale it encourages coasting and not doing much until your manager moves on for whatever reason and you have a window into moving up. It also means the Peter principle is in competition with getting promoted while not being very competent. I think there are specific fields and job where it’s a decent approach, but not at scale and not with salaries tied to promotions.
_j5l3 4y ago
> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse. Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets. 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.
  - qzx_pierri 4y ago
    It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.
    - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
      It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.
      - austhrow743 4y ago
        Large corporations?
        hansvm 4y ago
        Google only has a couple 100k employees at most. Other organizations dwarf that.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
monktastic1 4y ago
Yes, and it doesn't stop there: L3: $192,064 L4: $268,758 L5: $358,423 L6: $502,465 (!) https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot more, like over 20x more!?!
  - astrange 4y ago
    You might be forgetting self-employment tax there?
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      He's talking about making 10 million a year and you think the issue is he forgot the 8k or so of self employment FICA taxes?
      - astrange 4y ago
        Well he also added one too many zeroes, but that's just a surface level problem.
      - Terry_Roll 4y ago
        I've worked in UK tax havens. At the end of 2008 I had to add 3 more zero's so a trader could be paid their bonus.
  - bluedevilzn 4y ago
    Please tell me how I can make $10M per year (20 x $502k) And I’ll quit my job right now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)? Some L4s can make more than L6s. What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected. What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?
- fatnoah 4y ago
  >What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing? At a company like Facebook, the difference between L4 and L6 is over $100k in salary, and $80k in stock (difference in 4 year refresh grant of $325k). $180k a year difference isn't almost nothing.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    Not if the L4 started 3-4 years before the L6. Their original RSU grant might have been substantially more than they are handing out due to price appreciation, and thus their TC is much higher. This happened to hilarious effect at Amazon, where I had some coworkers that were receiving insane comp and were Sr, but not PE level. Originally they got a grant that was worth 500-600k that went up 5x.
    - ffggvv 4y ago
      price hasnt appreciated at meta lol
    - gowld 4y ago
      That's not L4 vs L6, that's start in 2015 vs 2108 or whatever.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    IIUC, there's a >$100k range in TC (grants, bonus, salary) - WITHOUT appreciation for L4s. It's >$150k range in TC for L6s. If there's a ~$180k difference between the average L6 and the average L4, and the bands are that wide - you have a lot of L4s making more than L6s. If an L4 is "Exceeding Expectations" enough to get huge grants and bonuses, and an L4 is "Needing Improvement" enough to get terrible grants and bonuses... Why is the L4 an L4 and the L6 an L6? Additionally, everyone has different (with big swings) of how much of their compensation comes from stock vs salary & bonus. When appreciation comes into play - this has large implications. Additionally, people working between 2-4 years often make substantially more money than anyone else at the company in their current level.
bspear 4y ago
This is why promo culture is impossible to remove at bigger companies. Perks of promotion (higher salary, title, status) far outweighs just trying to do right by customers. Whereas at early-stage startups, the only way to really make a lot of money is to grow the pie, which usually involves serving customers better. Now that there are so many well-funded startups (https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/) there are more paths to escape the promo BS and still make a great living
lanstin 4y ago
Any promo process with any randomness (especially a promo process that changes over time as upper management changes) is effectively a stochastic version of "promo after N years after not being fired." I don't worry much about promos, but still randomly get promos because the stuff I found important for a few years was also nicely slotted into the promo standards at the time. And the obsession on titles and such book-cover-like triva does seem to get worse the more they try to systematize the process. When it's clearly equivalent to rolling dice, people worry less about it. The more rigorous they make the process and the more they have panels and packets and so on, the more people start introducing each other with their title. My first ten years in software, no one cared about titles at all unless you met with a non-engineering org and met dumb people with an exalted titles (in which case you felt bad; titles only serve to harm morale, they never improve it). The last ten years, people act like becoming Senior Principal Staff Engineer is like becoming a different sort of human. It does correlate with more pay, so it's hard to say it's completely trivial, but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever, it's less important to happiness than fulfilling work, good co-workers, flexibility to meet your family or parenting obligations, autonomy over your work, and so on. One imagines one gets more autonomy by having a grander title, but really you get autonomy by just exercising the autonomy you have by being in control of the scarce and valuable resource of being able to create and improve software systems. If what you find important is valued by the organization you work in, then it will work out that people trust you, no matter the levels.
- klipt 4y ago
  > but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever That's probably where Bay Area housing inflation has an effect - houses that used to be affordable to "normal" engineers are now only affordable to staff engineers. Tech companies are hiring more and more people scrambling for a fixed supply of housing. Of course it's dystopian!
  - thumbsup-_- 4y ago
    I'm a staff engineer at one of FAANG and I cannot afford a house in bay area in 2022 (only considering prices and not the recent rate hikes). It's Sr Staff+ in bay area now for affording a decently sized house in a decent neighborhood that isn't too far from work centers like MV, SV and SF.
thumbsup-_- 4y ago
You are right. Till the time you have promotions tied with significant pay bump, you will have people working their a* off for promos and trying to do all it takes to satisfy criteria. >I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse. Though, If you do this you will have a culture where people are scared all the time and don't feel any job security.

pavlov 4y ago

Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way. Here's a blog post explaining their approach: https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-salaries/ https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s... Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone building up a software engineering workplace.

elefanten 4y ago
“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote” I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to join?” In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?
- dolni 4y ago
  Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO. You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere. There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.
      - bjt 4y ago
        While I see your point, I'd argue with "there's no benefit to doing better." People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.
        RHSeeger 4y ago
        I would expect the majority of people are more motivated by having some skin in the game than they are by the rewards of doing the work itself. I get great joy out of making my clients happy and solving hard problems (I enjoy rabbit holes), but even I get frustrated when there's no real advancement (financial or otherwise) for doing a better job.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year. I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.
- pavlov 4y ago
  For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how they feel about the system. It may well be that this appeals more to mid-career people with families and other life to worry about. But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture interviews, and has an interesting product space where you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this combination would be appealing to early-career people, especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or aren't set on acquiring that kind of résumé.
- gowld 4y ago
  > In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%? Why do you think you need the top 40%?
- rsanek 4y ago
  They mention this potential downside explicitly in the blog post. It sounds like they actually believe this is a good thing as it signals to junior employees that would need alot of support that they cannot provide it: > The way we’ve set up our levels, people in the early stages of their careers can get bigger titles and raises more quickly at other orgs than they can at Daily. This will likely be a deterrent to some early-stage candidates, but we are ok with that for now. While we are excited to bring in early-career people once we have the structure to support them, we aren’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a while. We don’t want to make the mistake of hiring high-potential people we then under-serve, especially if they’re from groups typically excluded from tech.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Japan traditionally has that “getting promoted after X years” approach. At scale it encourages coasting and not doing much until your manager moves on for whatever reason and you have a window into moving up. It also means the Peter principle is in competition with getting promoted while not being very competent. I think there are specific fields and job where it’s a decent approach, but not at scale and not with salaries tied to promotions.

_j5l3 4y ago

> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse. Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets. 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.
- qzx_pierri 4y ago
  It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.
    - austhrow743 4y ago
      Large corporations?
      - hansvm 4y ago
        Google only has a couple 100k employees at most. Other organizations dwarf that.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

monktastic1 4y ago

Yes, and it doesn't stop there: L3: $192,064 L4: $268,758 L5: $358,423 L6: $502,465 (!) https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/

Terry_Roll 4y ago
Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot more, like over 20x more!?!
- astrange 4y ago
  You might be forgetting self-employment tax there?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    He's talking about making 10 million a year and you think the issue is he forgot the 8k or so of self employment FICA taxes?
    - astrange 4y ago
      Well he also added one too many zeroes, but that's just a surface level problem.
    - Terry_Roll 4y ago
      I've worked in UK tax havens. At the end of 2008 I had to add 3 more zero's so a trader could be paid their bonus.
- bluedevilzn 4y ago
  Please tell me how I can make $10M per year (20 x $502k) And I’ll quit my job right now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)? Some L4s can make more than L6s. What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected. What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

fatnoah 4y ago
>What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing? At a company like Facebook, the difference between L4 and L6 is over $100k in salary, and $80k in stock (difference in 4 year refresh grant of $325k). $180k a year difference isn't almost nothing.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  Not if the L4 started 3-4 years before the L6. Their original RSU grant might have been substantially more than they are handing out due to price appreciation, and thus their TC is much higher. This happened to hilarious effect at Amazon, where I had some coworkers that were receiving insane comp and were Sr, but not PE level. Originally they got a grant that was worth 500-600k that went up 5x.
  - ffggvv 4y ago
    price hasnt appreciated at meta lol
  - gowld 4y ago
    That's not L4 vs L6, that's start in 2015 vs 2108 or whatever.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  IIUC, there's a >$100k range in TC (grants, bonus, salary) - WITHOUT appreciation for L4s. It's >$150k range in TC for L6s. If there's a ~$180k difference between the average L6 and the average L4, and the bands are that wide - you have a lot of L4s making more than L6s. If an L4 is "Exceeding Expectations" enough to get huge grants and bonuses, and an L4 is "Needing Improvement" enough to get terrible grants and bonuses... Why is the L4 an L4 and the L6 an L6? Additionally, everyone has different (with big swings) of how much of their compensation comes from stock vs salary & bonus. When appreciation comes into play - this has large implications. Additionally, people working between 2-4 years often make substantially more money than anyone else at the company in their current level.

bspear 4y ago

This is why promo culture is impossible to remove at bigger companies. Perks of promotion (higher salary, title, status) far outweighs just trying to do right by customers. Whereas at early-stage startups, the only way to really make a lot of money is to grow the pie, which usually involves serving customers better. Now that there are so many well-funded startups (https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/) there are more paths to escape the promo BS and still make a great living

lanstin 4y ago

Any promo process with any randomness (especially a promo process that changes over time as upper management changes) is effectively a stochastic version of "promo after N years after not being fired." I don't worry much about promos, but still randomly get promos because the stuff I found important for a few years was also nicely slotted into the promo standards at the time. And the obsession on titles and such book-cover-like triva does seem to get worse the more they try to systematize the process. When it's clearly equivalent to rolling dice, people worry less about it. The more rigorous they make the process and the more they have panels and packets and so on, the more people start introducing each other with their title. My first ten years in software, no one cared about titles at all unless you met with a non-engineering org and met dumb people with an exalted titles (in which case you felt bad; titles only serve to harm morale, they never improve it). The last ten years, people act like becoming Senior Principal Staff Engineer is like becoming a different sort of human. It does correlate with more pay, so it's hard to say it's completely trivial, but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever, it's less important to happiness than fulfilling work, good co-workers, flexibility to meet your family or parenting obligations, autonomy over your work, and so on. One imagines one gets more autonomy by having a grander title, but really you get autonomy by just exercising the autonomy you have by being in control of the scarce and valuable resource of being able to create and improve software systems. If what you find important is valued by the organization you work in, then it will work out that people trust you, no matter the levels.

klipt 4y ago
> but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever That's probably where Bay Area housing inflation has an effect - houses that used to be affordable to "normal" engineers are now only affordable to staff engineers. Tech companies are hiring more and more people scrambling for a fixed supply of housing. Of course it's dystopian!
- thumbsup-_- 4y ago
  I'm a staff engineer at one of FAANG and I cannot afford a house in bay area in 2022 (only considering prices and not the recent rate hikes). It's Sr Staff+ in bay area now for affording a decently sized house in a decent neighborhood that isn't too far from work centers like MV, SV and SF.

thumbsup-_- 4y ago

You are right. Till the time you have promotions tied with significant pay bump, you will have people working their a* off for promos and trying to do all it takes to satisfy criteria. >I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse. Though, If you do this you will have a culture where people are scared all the time and don't feel any job security.