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Comment by rockemsockem | Hacker News Reader

No, it really isn't.

The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.

An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.

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I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.

But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.

Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.

> The amount of time is very long

It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.

What did it used to be?

When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4 years.

That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.

I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.

What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform satisfactorily each year?

Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.

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