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MSM

It's different depending on the company.

https://www.levels.fyi/ has a breakdown for some of the largest companies but I typically think of it as:

Eng -> Senior -> Staff -> Principal -> Distinguished

with my simple explanation being:

Eng - Able to contribute to the team

Senior - Expert on the team

Staff - Expert in your organization

Principal - Expert in your domain

Distinguished - ?? - Seems to be that you damn near created your domain. I only see these at the largest companies and a lot of times it's folks that have created popular programming languages or frameworks that the company themselves use.

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Senior: we need to give them a promotion, but with no new responsibilities.

At many companies that's how you could define all the roles!

It more like "I need a promotion to make sure my compensation keeps up but with no new responsibilities!"

Distinguished means expert in the field. The distinguished engineer I knew who worked at Cisco contributed to the TCP/IP protocol and also basically built their first router.

Wait, Cisco stole it's first router, with the founders being forced to resign from Stanford as part of how the criminal charges got dropped.

Or are you talking about the Stanford Blue Box?

I am referring to Bill :)

On a side note, maybe the reason why every major company here has accusations of stealing ideas is that it's much easier to accuse someone than it is to actually take a real risk and build a successful product and business around it... I struggle to think of someone good who doesn't also have an unwarranted accusation against them (Carmack being the most recent example).

Outlawing non-competes made this Valley, and people here largely value freedom of innovation and execution over rent seeking of someone else's mind and ideas. Culturally speaking, this is the West Coast hacker ethos to a tee. Bringing suits, regulations, and lawyers to the party will only lead to our demise.

Accusations?

They openly stole Bill Yaeger's work, and never denied it. Bill wasn't an early employee of Cisco.

We're not talking about non-competes here, we're talking about taking source code and board designs verbatim and just swapping out the copyright assignments and adding "Cisco". All of this pontificating about trying tear people down who dared to take a risk is really gross in that context.

Yikes. Where can I read more about this? I wasn't able to dig anything up myself readily through online searching. If this is indeed the case, then you are absolutely right, and I would even fully redact what I said.

Edit: Yes, you're right, what a sad story :( and of course it is largely covered up to the point where people can easily be mistaken about it.

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