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Tech company career ladders

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Re: Tech company career ladders

#51

Post by sixdimensional »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #24

Within a job ladder, you then have levels. They tend to map onto years of experience, *whether you have a degree or not*, what kind of degree it is, how well you do in your interviews, how much money you ask for or hint about, and possibly how well you did as an intern. I don't work at a big corp. Has anyone seen career growth stall directly because they lack a (bachelor's) degree (in CS)? This article doesn't direct…

I have, in that for applying to jobs via job boards and postings, the algorithms eliminate you if you don't meet the minimum requirements. So, if you apply to a job requiring a degree in CS but don't have one, you often get deprioritized or flat out rejected.

If you get in without a CS degree, you often can get looked down upon as "not technical" or "more business than technical" unless you prove your chops coding.

Of course, one has to ask - how many people today have a CS education before they even reach college? It's possible that somebody already has CS education from high school and chooses to study something else to broaden their horizons.

Unfortunately, that can be a costly mistake when applying to jobs requiring a CS degree. But it can pay huge dividends in one's diversity and understanding of the world.

Places that really pay attention somewhat ignore your degree or education and focus on your skills and/or experience, IMHO.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#52

Post by peterburkimsher »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #38
peterburkimsher wrote: post #30

"inhumane quasi-slavery visa situation that we do to our friends who happen to be born somewhere else" - thank you so much for this rant. I've spent the last 3 years in Taiwan sitting tight and waiting until I have enough work experience to qualify for the Skilled Migrant Category visa for New Zealand (Canada and Australia are also options, with similar requirements). Now I have those 3 years, I'm trying to get a job…

You don't have a country to call home?

"Home" is a place I can settle, start a family, go back to and live in.

I grew up near Geneva. My parents bought a house in France because it was cheaper. My dad crossed the border every day to work at CERN and take me to international school.

I can't be Swiss, because my parents weren't resident. I can't be French, because I wasn't born there. The nearest French hospital is 2 hours away through the mountains and CERN paid for Swiss health insurance. I'm British by descent because my parents are from there. Future children born outside the UK cannot be British from me, because I wasn't born in the UK. If I stayed in Geneva and met a wife there in the same situation (very common with UN kids), and kept living with my parents, future children would be stateless.

My girlfriend is Taiwanese. If she and I had children, they would be Taiwanese from her, and would have to go to the military and learn how to kill foreigners. There's a conflict of interest - I don't want children to kill me. She had a great time in Australia on Working Holiday and wanted to go to New Zealand too, but couldn't get one of the 600 visas even though we stayed up all night and applied as soon as applications opened at 6 am.

For her to move to the UK requires her to meet income requirements of £18,600 per year, which she doesn't earn with her CAD job, and it would take 5 years. New Zealand offers PR after 2 years, and New Zealand PR is enough for children to get citizenship. (some countries e.g. Canada give citizenship at birth to everyone, but then it's possible for parents to lose their visa and be separated from kids - I want PR before I marry).

Re: Tech company career ladders

#53

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

zwkrt wrote: post #25
kevan wrote: post #17

If anyone's wondering SDE2/L5 at Amazon is the first 'career' role on the engineering ladder.

Is that true? I would have guessed it was 3 based on the expected level of responsibility of the respective roles. As an engineer I felt like L5 was a position that meant I could trust the coworker to be effective, but I would be wary of joining a team that had no L6s.

L3 at other companies is an L4 at Amazon (I believe only contractors or part-time employees can be < 4). L5 also has a much wider surface area and the gap from L5 to L6 is quite big.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#54

Post by maxxxxx »

Afforess wrote: post #20
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Through all of this, if your manager isn't supporting you, you're probably doomed. Unless they do something that's obviously going to get the company in legal trouble, HR won't care. Remember, HR is there to keep the company out of hot water, and they are never there for you. This is very true in my experience and probably worth underscoring. How many of you feel like your boss isn't supporting you? Whenever that hap…

On the dark side, the real advice is to join teams where none of the engineers are supporting the manager. Ensure the manager is not a literal demon; just sidelined by engineers "who know best", and then do better. With only a trivial amount of work to meet arbitrary management deadlines, you'll be a hero or saint. "Exceeds Expectations" and promotions will rain down on you.

That's a pretty complex system. It may be easier to find a supportive manager :-)

Re: Tech company career ladders

#55

Post by taneq »

mlazos wrote: post #2

I think this article unfairly paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case. I have plenty of friends at small companies who feel like their c-suite is filled with sociopaths and because the company is under the radar nobody cares how the employees of said company are treated.

Even if the people are great, small (5-20 employee) companies often simply don't have scope for much career progression. You might have one layer of management between yourself and the company owner, so unless they start hiring or you plan on taking over the company, you can only be promoted once.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#56

Post by sudosteph »

zwkrt wrote: post #25
kevan wrote: post #17

If anyone's wondering SDE2/L5 at Amazon is the first 'career' role on the engineering ladder.

Is that true? I would have guessed it was 3 based on the expected level of responsibility of the respective roles. As an engineer I felt like L5 was a position that meant I could trust the coworker to be effective, but I would be wary of joining a team that had no L6s.

I can corroborate. Career level just means you won't get fired if you stop advancing. There are plenty of people who still pursue L6 though out of pride though. It's extremely difficult for an experienced SDE to get hired on at L6 level too, so most have to work up to it.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#57

Post by akhilcacharya »

fyfy18 wrote: post #40

Does anyone else feel really put off on the idea of working at a big tech corporation by articles like this? If I wanted to play the career game, I would have studyied something more business related and got a graduate job at somewhere like KPMG.

Because working as an SWE in bigtech can pay 2-3x as much?

Including signing a FB new grad can make up to ~$225k in their first year. There aren’t many industries where this is possible with a bachelors or less.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#58

Post by ummonk »

fyfy18 wrote: post #40

Does anyone else feel really put off on the idea of working at a big tech corporation by articles like this? If I wanted to play the career game, I would have studyied something more business related and got a graduate job at somewhere like KPMG.

Software big 5 have much better pay and much better work-life balance than accounting big 5.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#59

Post by manish_gill »

I joined a startup directly from college and only worked at small (3-4 people) companies for the first 3 years of my career. Going from that to a ~250 people organization, when I joined, I figured "Software Engineer" was a good role, but it turned out everyone was surprised that I wasn't a "Senior Software Engineer".

Even though I basically designed and coded the entire data layer of the platform, maintain and administer the entire pipeline (including the production databases), am on call any time anything goes wrong, my title was only very recently changed to "Senior Software Engineer" - and it was independent from any increase in salary, which didn't happen. The title change was also "promised" to me for a few months after appraisal - presumably to retain me.

It's all weird but strangely, it had started to grate on me the last year that despite all the critical work I did, the salary and position did not reflect it at all. Still doesn't.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#60

Post by busterarm »

taneq wrote: post #55
mlazos wrote: post #2

I think this article unfairly paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case. I have plenty of friends at small companies who feel like their c-suite is filled with sociopaths and because the company is under the radar nobody cares how the employees of said company are treated.

Even if the people are great, small (5-20 employee) companies often simply don't have scope for much career progression. You might have one layer of management between yourself and the company owner, so unless they start hiring or you plan on taking over the company, you can only be promoted once.

Yeah except your promotion isn't usually a level, it's lead, manager, director, or chief. You leverage that and walk to a slightly larger company in that new role after a couple of years. Then rinse & repeat once or twice and you just shaved off years of slogging through the FAANGs.

After all of the above though, I would put 2-3 years in at a FAANG and then do whatever the heck I want.

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