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The biggest issue I've seen with new engineers is a mismatch between what behaviours they think the company should reward them for, vs the actual things the company judges performance on. Pay attention to some senior people who are doing well and see what it is that they're doing to be successful. Hint: it's usually not writing the best/most code.

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Often what is considered success at L6 is different than at L4 so this should be done very carefully. Generally at lower levels writing good code is much more important.

I’ve seen new engineers that tried to rush senior eng behaviours and they didn’t do well in performance reviews until they corrected their behavior. You need to prove you can be a baseline contributor before you start dreaming big.

Levels are another thing that are management done poorly, like management by stack ranking. "Levels" are usually made up with little concern for actually creating value or helping employees be awesome. Rather, they serve as a formalism for forcing objects of various shapes and sizes through round holes because 0) they can't think of anything better and 1) other large companies do it, so it must be right.

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