[tdeck]

I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going into detail, this person built projects used by many people reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary senior engineer level at Google.

[rachelbythebay]

Google hired me in 2006 (then 11 years of experience) as a 3. I didn't know any better at the time, partly because I was coming into the valley from the rest of the world.

I didn't find out just how screwed up this was until becoming part of the hiring process at Facebook... some seven or eight years later.

So... yeah. What you said is totally a thing.

[fsociety]

Wow Google tried a lot of mental gymnastics to down level me. Trying to convince me that higher levels at FB or other companies is equivalent.

That’s a whole other level though. Not surprising and it is hard when it’s a coveted company. I would’ve taken the down level if I didn’t have a better offer at another company.

[sudeepj]

The key question imo is:

Was he still subjected to same interview process where he has to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent open-source contributor?

As for L5 level based on anecdotal stories anything beyond L6 is hard in Google.

Search for "Crossing that barrier to L6 is getting more and more difficult with time" in [1]

[1] https://debarghyadas.com/writes/why-i-left-google/

The article is from 2019 and its not that old.

[onion2k]

Was he still subjected to same interview process where he has to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent open-source contributor

Google don't want people who are generally great developers though. They want people with specific skills who can solve the complex compsci problems they think they have. Consequently they hire people who can invert binary trees rather than people who can just write good or popular open source code.

Google's failure to capture the public imagination is why so many Google products get killed off, so I reckon they're solving the wrong problems. If Google engineers were less inclined to think 'this is a hard problem that only very clever people can solve' and more 'this is a simple problem that needs a better solution' they'd launch more things people actually want to use.

This actually means Google would be far better off hiring the popular open source dev instead of (or as well as) the PhD in Binary Tree Gravity dev.

[tdeck]

Yes, but my point is plenty of fairly ordinary engineers make it to L5 - it's nothing special. I feel uncomfortable going into this person's accomplishments, but other engineers I know were similarly shocked. If that and skipping some interviews is all being a leader in open source buys you, it isn't worth the extra effort from a bigCo career perspective.

[vmception]

You shouldn’t be shocked by that, there are similar stories where the maintainer of a project, used by most engineers at Google, couldnt get hired due to the lesser relevant leet code / design / behavioral interviews