I see parent's point as how you'd evaluate the performance of an international superstar in your team.
You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good.
Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.
That's basically in the job description for the highest levels though. They're expected to literally lead the industry in their field. If they're merely now a solid and productive programmer/uber tech lead then they don't remotely merit such a high position. Since demotion doesn't exist for various reasons, the only solution is separation.
a lifetime ago back at Microsoft, Peter Spiro described these folks job expectation as "walk on water". if you wanted to exceed expectations, you had to "leave no wake"...
A L9 manager has a very different job. That's a VP and they've probably got 500 people under them. Very high level ICs are also somewhat often directly managed by lower level managers (who are also paid much less). It isn't terribly uncommon to see an L8 managed by a L7.
Managing 500 people is a far lower responsibility than "redefine the entire industry". The entire industry is probably a hundred thousand workers and dozens of companies making hundreds of billions of dollars and you have to completely change the game for all of them. Why should someone who only manages a mere 500 people get more than one thousandth of the compensation? They probably only have a dozen direct reports anyway.
That's just a reflection of the fact that it's much easier to have a big impact if you direct an entire org to make it happen rather than trying to be a hero and doing it all individually.
> Since demotion doesn't exist for various reasons
maybe not in faangs, but I've seen CTOs and directors downshift to ICs in multiple startups and public tech companies. Honestly kicking them out instead sounds like a huge waste, if the person can make solid contributions in a different, maybe less intense, role, why not let them?
At Google it is actually common to have directors or VPs who don't have reports for a while, but we are talking about people who are ICs already. For each management position there is an equivalent IC position at Google with similar pay. I believe L9 would be a senior director.
From what I've seen these senior people with no reports at the moment (or those with org sizes too small) were hardest hit in the layoffs, simply because of the misfortune of bad timing.
The very best engineer I've ever worked with at any company (Anna B.) just got promoted to Distinguished last year. She accomplished one or two industry-leading things before that :-)
Well it dilutes a conversation when someone implies a senior Google employee is surely to be expected to be at the tier of disrupting entire markets in order to get and keep their job.
If that is what really defines an L9 job at Google I think we'd all have been praising the typical L9 Google employees on HN long ago. And we'd all be justified in being angry Google decided to fire such a person.
Or maybe Google should pay their salary indefinitely because they were capable of disrupting a market at some point in their career? Or maybe yes, such a person needs to work at Google type company so all of us can benefit from the optimal situation from which to maximize their talent, even though such a company would let them go. Otherwise we'd all lose out on such a person being capable of contributing to the world if Google lays them off.
What else could they do then without a company who doesn't appreciate keeping them on?
The ones that don't probably would if it was public about how much of a significant contribution they've made to some foundational AWS services everyone knows. I think they don't mind.
I’m not sure what exactly is a L9 at Google, but this looks a lot like research positions in many huge companies.
For instance there was researchers on voice recognition at Yahoo! way before the voice assistants became a product, and if I could imagine one of them bring up a well working model 6 months before the competition, and have a voice assistant hit the market.
It would disrupt an entire market.
But they’re not alone of course, and I don’t know how many other researchers are on the payroll trying to breakthrough other fields. All of them have a “disrupt the entire market” expectation I think, and of course their employer is also expected to give them enough time and leeway to make progress. They probably bring small improvement on existing things, and the number of papers published every year could be another measure as a temporizing strategy. But their actual stated goal is probably very ambitious and they’d be failing at it for a very long time.
From your ranking, L9 seems to not depend on the company anymore, looks more research. You cannot expect to shape/redefine industry every year, that's absurd. By this model every math/physics/chemistry research teacher should be fired every year.
And to be honest I don't think google has these expectations. Most probably he was was fired for different reasons, not performance
Research is theoretical. These roles are very much practical. These are the kind of people who drive partnerships across companies, lead important industry standards, and come up with ideas for entire new markets and products.
This is not a job everyone wants or is capable of doing. There are a very limited number of such positions, and those who want them must justify the position's existence.
Yeah, but if you have to lead a standard, it may take years and it sucks a lot of time. So can you, while trying to direct 15 other possibly clueless people, disrupt the industry in another way?
I try to imagine the standups these people have: "Which industry have you redefined yesterday? Which industry are you redefining today? Do you have any blockers?"
I somewhat get that, but if you are promoting people for amazing hits, then you are doing it wrong. You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, but for being a solid addition to the team that provides steady progress.
> You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project,
At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned.
Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.
>Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it.
It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful. If a project turns out to be a dead-end, that's either management's fault, or just the way the market worked out and no one's fault (you can't always predict what's going to be popular or successful). And if a project is clearly a dead-end, then why is management wasting money on it instead of canceling it and moving the talent to better places? Basically, Google's system just rewards people for being lucky.
Engineers: "We want an engineering-led organization!"
Google: "OK, here's some real responsibility over company direction."
Engineers: "No, not like that."
I mean, I work at a normal-ass medium-sized company and at our top level of IC technical staff even we're expected to help management choose between different strategic options and point out places we can improve the product based on technical synergies or easy wins they may not be aware of. If we do a bad job at this, we will also get laid off on way or another, at latest when the company runs out of money.
Especially at Google's size, you can just throw up your hands and say "oh well, the market is hard to guess." You are the market!
> Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"
This is not what engineers say (nor what the company needs unless you take vapid definitions of "good" and "well"). The MBAs aren't the ones asking for a dozen messaging apps!
> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful
If you just do what management tells you at Google you will never be promoted past L4. You need to come up with new ideas and projects to sell to management. The key is to align your project ideas with what management says they want.
sounds really exhausting... if that's the constant expectation and you're actually good at it, why work for Google at all and not fundraise for yourself? cuz you're doing all the same legwork but your ideas go to the man.
I think it is exciting actually. Google a bit of a mess internally so there are lots of problems to solve. Everyone knows that these problems exist but people either aren't brave enough to defy management spend to the time to solve the problems or don't know how to promote their proposals to whom
If you are happy being handed pre-scoped work, you can just stay at L4, which many people do.
It's not "really exhausting", it's just doing your job?? Personally I enjoy more coming up with my own stuff and fighting to launch it than just following orders (my favorite career accomplishments are making .app and .dev happen).
good for you, i can't imagine myself being under the gun to come up with a new funded project every year (or however often), would rather just work on some real product with revenue even if it's not very original
Based on this comment it seems like you have a highly distorted view of what it's actually like. You're arguing against a strawman.
It's not like that at all. Possibly it's like that for a high level PM, but for a SWE, it's more about putting yourself on the right project. You certainly don't have to constantly be coming up with new products on your own.
Also like, projects can last more than a year. There's something finishing up now that started work in like 2019 and planning in idk, 2016. And I know people who have gotten multiple promotions over growing their contributions to that particular endeavor.
Quite a lot of L9s did start companies, which were then acquired by Google. Others are working on things that already require a large amount of capital or influence, or just otherwise want to keep working on projects rather than administration.
If you can make 600k a year, a few years in a row (let's say three). How does 1.8M in hand stack up against starting your own business, with maybe a bigger potential number, but a lower statistical chance of making it there.
> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful.
That's simply not how it works at Google. Everyone has skin in the game. Who are you to say how it's "supposed" to work there? I'm telling you how it actually is.
And that's probably part of what's happening at Apple as well ? We've seen important, but not quite groundbreaking products get left for dead, and eventually killed when at Apple's size it probably wasn't that problematic to keep them alive. I'm thinking about their network router lineup for instance. Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.
> Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.
Supposedly Steve Jobs hated every iteration of the calculator on the first iPad, so they just didn't ship it at all. Might just be tradition at Apple to not touch that topic.
Google pays over $300k a year for many of their engineers, and Apple pays quite well too. Regardless of how easy that calculator app is, it'll take a team of people to build, and that team is expensive, like millions of dollars expensive, and it'll never be worth it.
It's tough to distinguish between luck and skill. A lot of cognitive biases come into play in performance evaluation, and managers have to make decisions based on very little data.
You get paid for being a solid addition on a team providing steady progress. If you continue to do the same thing and make the same valuable but incremental progress, why should your job role change?
This is one of the advantages of having reasonably wide pay bands at Google. Doing a great job within your level will earn you raises. You don't need promotion for that (to a limit). Why should promotion just be something earned after doing the same thing for a long time?
It seems the right solution would be bonus-based compensation. If they redefine an industry, massive bonus, if they’re just a really good engineer, then get normal really good engineer salary.
Or a demotion. Is that ever an option in companies, or do they have to go straight to firing?
You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good.
Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.