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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#111

Post by eddyfromtheblok »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #100
zrobotics wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's po…

Google was the company that kept making the web better in every way. Amazing search, endless services each with solid json APIs, a fast multi-process web-browser, & investment in the web as a whole. Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.…

Wasn’t the G+ push a response to Facebook’s popularity, that they feared losing out on ad revenue?

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#112

Post by enneff »

jjeaff wrote: post #62
enneff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated. If I take another software gi…

and then, after all that bad leadership and bureaucracy, one of the top executives (Schmidt) blames google's lost lead in AI on the workers who don't want to work anymore and are just concerned with getting all the perks and work life balance.

Yeah he should really stop saying stuff. My opinion of him has really plummeted.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#113

Post by nostrademons »

cperciva wrote: post #74

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involve…

Like others mentioned, Amazon levels are one level below Google levels, and I think their higher ranks are also compressed. Also IMHO Google IC SWE levels of 2024 are about 1.5 levels below Google IC SWE levels of 2009 (i.e. a mid-L6 today is about as good as someone just promoted to L5 in 2010, an L8 promotee today is about a mid-L6 from 2010, a new L4 today is the equivalent of an intern back then). So with that mapping I'd put Google L3-L4 = Junior Developer, L5/early L6 = Developer, mid-L6+ = Senior Developer today.

Fifteen years ago L5 was actually senior, L4 was a developer, L3 was a junior developer. L6+ = you owned major user-visible features with hundreds of millions of users. L9 = you did something world-class like invent BigTable or Google News, and L10 didn't exist.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#114

Post by astral303 »

beebmam wrote: post #110
advisory5739f2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SRE is an anti pattern that Google is unwilling to admit and is selling books on. Just like there should not be QA, release engineering, continuing engineering or DBA as separate departments/job titles, because these critical parts of software development should not be considered optional and thrown over the wall to take care of by someone with no stake in developing the product.

Regardless of these fields being separate departments/job titles: people are not getting promoted for doing QA, release engineering, continuing engineering, or DBA work. It's a huge cultural problem in tech.

I agree that doing this work is looked down upon and not recognized as the critical work that it is.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#115

Post by cperciva »

codemac wrote: post #108
cperciva wrote: post #74

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involve…

Nah, you're pretty far off in terms of population numbers at FAANG. Amazon's levels are largely L-1 most places in terms of comp (aka aws L7 gets paid G L6), and 7+ at Meta is ~1% of the company's employees, and even less of it's SWE. Amazon and Microsoft also have less "alignment" at various levels compared to silicon valley due to literal geographic and historical reasons. Principal SWE at AWS is probably ~L6 at G…

Ok, so at Google L3-L5 are junior developers, L6/L7 are developers, and L8+ is senior developers?

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#116

Post by dexwiz »

advisory5739f2 wrote: post #109
rr808 wrote: post #29

I've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting…

SRE is an anti pattern that Google is unwilling to admit and is selling books on. Just like there should not be QA, release engineering, continuing engineering or DBA as separate departments/job titles, because these critical parts of software development should not be considered optional and thrown over the wall to take care of by someone with no stake in developing the product.

This is such a crazy take for me. Any profession that matures eventually specializes. I wouldn’t expect the same person to pour my foundation, install the plumbing, and wire the building. Yet in an ever expanding field we expect someone to be able to do it all. Also saying people who don’t code have no stake so egocentric.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#117

Post by lexlash »

cperciva wrote: post #99
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Especially at Amazon a Principal engineer (equivalent to Google L6) is a pretty rare beast in some areas of the company. Sure there are some hip orgs with a lot of senior engineers, but in general it's not a common position at all. Isn't L10 a VP at Amazon? Never heard of one doing any real engineering work.

Principal Engineer is L7 at a Amazon. So if that's the same as a Google L6 I guess the scales are a bit different. As for L10, that's Distinguished Engineer. I think if they're managers they're also called VPs? I'm not exactly sure what the deal is there; but I know plenty of Amazon L10s who are fantastic engineers.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software... is largely accurate. An L7 at Amazon would have an easy time getting an L6 interview at Google; an L6 at Google would not have an easy time getting an L7 interview at Amazon, barring prior experience and other modifiers.

Of note, The person who wrote this article spent the vast majority of their tenure as a SRE TL/M, from their timeline. That's not going to map cleanly into any career track at Amazon, and when this person tried being an L6 SWE, they transitioned back into management.

At Google, I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were fantastic engineers; I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were pure-management and excellent at that but hadn't written code in a decade and change. Varied dramatically by what the org needed - those engineer-managers tended to have a lot of lower-leveled engineers and the pure-managers had more highly leveled engineering reporting to them.

Anyways, while I was at Google, L5 was the lowest level where you could officially have a direct report (not counting interns), so yeah, anything of cross-team note was generally lead by an L6 or higher. (L5s routinely lead things that were critical _inside_ of a given group, but if you were having cross-team impact, well, that's L6 work.)

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#118

Post by lexlash »

georgeburdell wrote: post #69

Perhaps a condescending take but I think the author got a bit of a big head from getting promoted quickly, and the subtext is that it was due to their amazing technical competence. It’s a noteworthy feat to get recruited out of school, but SRE is a godawful position with high attrition, so it’s easier than SWE to get promoted. That they regret not moving to SWE sooner ignores that SRE is a talent sink and considered…

Yeah, as an ex-SWE, seeing this person take just over two years to get from L3 to L5 is kind of shocking.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#119

Post by lexlash »

cperciva wrote: post #115
codemac wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you're pretty far off in terms of population numbers at FAANG. Amazon's levels are largely L-1 most places in terms of comp (aka aws L7 gets paid G L6), and 7+ at Meta is ~1% of the company's employees, and even less of it's SWE. Amazon and Microsoft also have less "alignment" at various levels compared to silicon valley due to literal geographic and historical reasons. Principal SWE at AWS is probably ~L6 at G…

Ok, so at Google L3-L5 are junior developers, L6/L7 are developers, and L8+ is senior developers?

I'm not sure what you mean by "junior" here.

L3 is early career, L4 is mid-career, L5 is senior. You can hit L5 on the strength of pure technical contributions regardless of business/org needs, usually.

L6+ is staff, and tends to involve a very different skillset. (If you're not looking to lead a team, you're probably not going to have the kind of impact that gets you to L6, let alone L7 or higher at Google.)

This is all to say that ICs in the L3/L4/L5 bucket generally show a clear progression in technical skills but beyond that it's fuzzier.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#120

Post by lexlash »

rurban wrote: post #104
cperciva wrote: post #74

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involve…

Look at her github repos. I would call her a L4 for the technical skills there. Good code, but not top seniority at all.

To be fair to her, those contributions are quite old and probably not representative of current skills.
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